Related papers: GoSafeOpt: Scalable Safe Exploration for Global Op…
Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.g. simulated) environments. In this work, we tackle this challenge by utilizing suboptimal yet conservative…
The decision and planning system for autonomous driving in urban environments is hard to design. Most current methods manually design the driving policy, which can be expensive to develop and maintain at scale. Instead, with imitation…
Rapid progress in imitation learning, foundation models, and large-scale datasets has led to robot manipulation policies that generalize to a wide-range of tasks and environments. However, rigorous evaluation of these policies remains a…
Optimization of expensive computer models with the help of Gaussian process emulators in now commonplace. However, when several (competing) objectives are considered, choosing an appropriate sampling strategy remains an open question. We…
Ensuring the safety of environmental exploration is a critical problem in reinforcement learning (RL). While limiting exploration to a feasible zone has become widely accepted as a way to ensure safety, key questions remain unresolved: what…
While deep reinforcement learning techniques have recently produced considerable achievements on many decision-making problems, their use in robotics has largely been limited to simulated worlds or restricted motions, since unconstrained…
We study automated intrusion prevention using reinforcement learning. In a novel approach, we formulate the problem of intrusion prevention as an optimal stopping problem. This formulation allows us insight into the structure of the optimal…
We consider a sequential decision making task, where the goal is to optimize an unknown function without evaluating parameters that violate an a~priori unknown (safety) constraint. A common approach is to place a Gaussian process prior on…
Reinforcement learning can acquire complex behaviors from high-level specifications. However, defining a cost function that can be optimized effectively and encodes the correct task is challenging in practice. We explore how inverse optimal…
This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…
The deployment of robots in uncontrolled environments requires them to operate robustly under previously unseen scenarios, like irregular terrain and wind conditions. Unfortunately, while rigorous safety frameworks from robust optimal…
For autonomous mobile robots, uncertainties in the environment and system model can lead to failure in the motion planning pipeline, resulting in potential collisions. In order to achieve a high level of robust autonomy, these robots should…
This work proposed an efficient learning-based framework to learn feedback control policies from human teleoperated demonstrations, which achieved obstacle negotiation, staircase traversal, slipping control and parcel delivery for a tracked…
While reinforcement learning (RL) holds great potential for decision making in the real world, it suffers from a number of unique difficulties which often need specific consideration. In particular: it is highly non-stationary; suffers from…
Both the design and control of a robot play equally important roles in its task performance. However, while optimal control is well studied in the machine learning and robotics community, less attention is placed on finding the optimal…
We address the design and synthesis of optimal control strategies for high-dimensional stochastic dynamical systems. Such systems may be deterministic nonlinear systems evolving from random initial states, or systems driven by random…
Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) provides a versatile framework for developing unified controllers capable of handling wide ranges of tasks, exploring environments, and adapting behaviors. However, its reliance on…
This paper presents a data-driven strategy to streamline the deployment of model-based controllers in legged robotic hardware platforms. Our approach leverages a model-free safe learning algorithm to automate the tuning of control gains,…
We develop a control algorithm that ensures the safety, in terms of confinement in a set, of a system with unknown, 2nd-order nonlinear dynamics. The algorithm establishes novel connections between data-driven and robust, nonlinear control.…
This paper studies, for the first time, the trajectory planning problem in adversarial environments, where the objective is to design the trajectory of a robot to reach a desired final state despite the unknown and arbitrary action of an…