Related papers: GoSafeOpt: Scalable Safe Exploration for Global Op…
The safe operation of an autonomous system is a complex endeavor, one pivotal element being its decision-making. Decision-making logic can formally be analyzed using model checking or other formal verification approaches. Yet, the…
This paper proposes a cooperative environmental learning algorithm working in a fully distributed manner. A multi-robot system is more effective for exploration tasks than a single robot, but it involves the following challenges: 1) online…
The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…
This paper presents a safe learning framework that employs an adaptive model learning algorithm together with barrier certificates for systems with possibly nonstationary agent dynamics. To extract the dynamic structure of the model, we use…
A fundamental challenge in learning an unknown dynamical system is to reduce model uncertainty by making measurements while maintaining safety. We formulate a mathematical definition of what it means to safely learn a dynamical system by…
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in robotic systems presents unique safety challenges, particularly in unpredictable environments. Although LLMs, leveraging zero-shot learning, enhance human-robot interaction and…
We propose a safe exploration algorithm for deterministic Markov Decision Processes with unknown transition models. Our algorithm guarantees safety by leveraging Lipschitz-continuity to ensure that no unsafe states are visited during…
Adaptive control approaches yield high-performance controllers when a precise system model or suitable parametrizations of the controller are available. Existing data-driven approaches for adaptive control mostly augment standard…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
Collision-free motion is essential for mobile robots. Most approaches to collision-free and efficient navigation with wheeled robots require parameter tuning by experts to obtain good navigation behavior. This study investigates the…
Ensuring safety in industrial control systems usually involves imposing constraints at the design stage of the control algorithm. Enforcing constraints is challenging if the underlying functional form is unknown. The challenge can be…
We present an online model-based reinforcement learning algorithm suitable for controlling complex robotic systems directly in the real world. Unlike prevailing sim-to-real pipelines that rely on extensive offline simulation and model-free…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have shown tremendous success in simulation environments, but their application to real-world problems faces significant challenges, with safety being a major concern. In particular, enforcing…
This paper presents an online path planning algorithm for safe autonomous manipulation of a flexibly constrained object in an unknown environment. Methods for real time identification and characterization of perceived flexible constraints…
We consider the problem of designing a sequential decision making agent to maximize an unknown time-varying function which switches with time. At each step, the agent receives an observation of the function's value at a point decided by the…
Autonomous robots often encounter challenging situations where their control policies fail and an expert human operator must briefly intervene, e.g., through teleoperation. In settings where multiple robots act in separate environments, a…
This paper proposes a safe data-driven control framework for nonlinear systems with partially known dynamics. The method ensures stability and constraint satisfaction during online learning, assuming only a stabilizable linear approximation…
Tasks involving locally unstable or discontinuous dynamics (such as bifurcations and collisions) remain challenging in robotics, because small variations in the environment can have a significant impact on task outcomes. For such tasks,…
Navigating a collision-free and optimal trajectory for a robot is a challenging task, particularly in environments with moving obstacles such as humans. We formulate this problem as a stochastic optimal control problem. Since solving the…
We consider the problem of sequentially maximizing an unknown function $f$ over a set of actions of the form $(s,\mathbf{x})$, where the selected actions must satisfy a safety constraint with respect to an unknown safety function $g$. We…