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In robotic planetary surface exploration, strategic mobility planning is an important task that involves finding candidate long-distance routes on orbital maps and identifying segments with uncertain traversability. Then, expert human…
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…
Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…
Enforcing state-wise safety constraints is critical for the application of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world problems, such as autonomous driving and robot manipulation. However, existing safe RL methods only enforce state-wise…
Robot learning is witnessing a significant increase in the size, diversity, and complexity of pre-collected datasets, mirroring trends in domains such as natural language processing and computer vision. Many robot learning methods treat…
This paper presents a novel algorithm for the continuous control of dynamical systems that combines Trajectory Optimization (TO) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a single framework. The motivations behind this algorithm are the two main…
Nonlinear trajectory optimization algorithms have been developed to handle optimal control problems with nonlinear dynamics and nonconvex constraints in trajectory planning. The performance and computational efficiency of many trajectory…
Policy optimization is an effective reinforcement learning approach to solve continuous control tasks. Recent achievements have shown that alternating online and offline optimization is a successful choice for efficient trajectory reuse.…
We consider the stochastic shortest path planning problem in MDPs, i.e., the problem of designing policies that ensure reaching a goal state from a given initial state with minimum accrued cost. In order to account for rare but important…
We consider a control problem for a finite-state Markov system whose performance is evaluated by a coherent Markov risk measure. For each policy, the risk of a state is approximated by a function of its features, thus leading to a…
Reinforcement learning is a widely used approach to autonomous navigation, showing potential in various tasks and robotic setups. Still, it often struggles to reach distant goals when safety constraints are imposed (e.g., the wheeled robot…
We consider the problem of designing policies for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with dynamic coherent risk objectives. Synthesizing risk-averse optimal policies for POMDPs requires infinite memory and thus…
Many policy search algorithms have been proposed for robot learning and proved to be practical in real robot applications. However, there are still hyperparameters in the algorithms, such as the exploration rate, which requires manual…
Policy search reinforcement learning allows robots to acquire skills by themselves. However, the learning procedure is inherently unsafe as the robot has no a-priori way to predict the consequences of the exploratory actions it takes.…
Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…
For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…
Since its introduction a decade ago, \emph{relative entropy policy search} (REPS) has demonstrated successful policy learning on a number of simulated and real-world robotic domains, not to mention providing algorithmic components used by…
Most policy search algorithms require thousands of training episodes to find an effective policy, which is often infeasible with a physical robot. This survey article focuses on the extreme other end of the spectrum: how can a robot adapt…
Considering uncertainties and disturbances is an important, yet challenging, step in successful decision making. The problem becomes more challenging in safety-constrained environments. In this paper, we propose a robust and safe trajectory…
Constraint Optimization Problems (COP) pose intricate challenges in combinatorial problems usually addressed through Branch and Bound (B\&B) methods, which involve maintaining priority queues and iteratively selecting branches to search for…