Related papers: On Safety Testing, Validation, and Characterizatio…
Deep reinforcement learning produces robust locomotion policies for legged robots over challenging terrains. To date, few studies have leveraged model-based methods to combine these locomotion skills with the precise control of…
Safety-critical robot systems need thorough testing to expose design flaws and software bugs which could endanger humans. Testing in simulation is becoming increasingly popular, as it can be applied early in the development process and does…
Robotic failure is all too common in unstructured robot tasks. Despite well-designed controllers, robots often fail due to unexpected events. How do robots measure unexpected events? Many do not. Most robots are driven by the sense-plan act…
Sim-to-real discrepancies hinder learning-based policies from achieving high-precision tasks in the real world. While Domain Randomization (DR) is commonly used to bridge this gap, it often relies on heuristics and can lead to overly…
It has always been expected that a robot can be easily deployed to unknown scenarios, accomplishing robotic grasping tasks without human intervention. Nevertheless, existing grasp detection approaches are typically off-body techniques and…
The robot learning community has made great strides in recent years, proposing new architectures and showcasing impressive new capabilities; however, the dominant metric used in the literature, especially for physical experiments, is…
Dynamic locomotion in rough terrain requires accurate foot placement, collision avoidance, and planning of the underactuated dynamics of the system. Reliably optimizing for such motions and interactions in the presence of imperfect and…
This paper develops a physics-informed scenario approach for safety verification of nonlinear systems using barrier certificates (BCs) to ensure that system trajectories remain within safe regions over an infinite time horizon. Designing…
The deformable and continuum nature of soft robots promises versatility and adaptability. However, control of modular, multi-limbed soft robots for terrestrial locomotion is challenging due to the complex robot structure, actuator mechanics…
Safe deployment of autonomous robots in diverse scenarios requires agents that are capable of efficiently adapting to new environments while satisfying constraints. In this work, we propose a practical and theoretically-justified approach…
For a general standardized testing algorithm designed to evaluate a specific aspect of a robot's performance, several key expectations are commonly imposed. Beyond accuracy (i.e., closeness to a typically unknown ground-truth reference) and…
This study proposes an integrated task and motion planning method for dynamic locomotion in partially observable environments with multi-level safety guarantees. This layered planning framework is composed of a high-level symbolic task…
One of the fundamental challenges in realizing the potential of legged robots is generating plans to traverse challenging terrains. Control actions must be carefully selected so the robot will not crash or slip. The high dimensionality of…
This study proposes a hierarchically integrated framework for safe task and motion planning (TAMP) of bipedal locomotion in a partially observable environment with dynamic obstacles and uneven terrain. The high-level task planner employs…
The homologation of automated vehicles, being safety-critical complex systems, requires sound evidence for their safe operability. Traditionally, verification and validation activities are guided by a combination of ISO 26262 and ISO/PAS…
Safety critical systems are typically subjected to hazard analysis before commissioning to identify and analyse potentially hazardous system states that may arise during operation. Currently, hazard analysis is mainly based on human…
Controlling Wheeled-legged robots is challenging especially on slippery surfaces due to their dependence on continuous ground contact. Unlike quadrupeds or bipeds, which can leverage multiple fixed contact points for recovery,…
This paper presents ModelGuard, a sampling-based approach to runtime model validation for Lipschitz-continuous models. Although techniques exist for the validation of many classes of models the majority of these methods cannot be applied to…
Achieving safe quadrupedal locomotion in real-world environments has attracted much attention in recent years. When walking over uneven terrain, achieving reliable estimation and realising safety-critical control based on the obtained…
Reliability analysis is a sub-field of uncertainty quantification that assesses the probability of a system performing as intended under various uncertainties. Traditionally, this analysis relies on deterministic models, where experiments…