Related papers: Sample-efficient Safe Learning for Online Nonlinea…

Sequential decision making using Markov Decision Process underpins many realworld applications. Both model-based and model free methods have achieved strong results in these settings. However, real-world tasks must balance reward…

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a powerful method for enabling robots to perform novel tasks as it is often more tractable for a non-roboticist end-user to demonstrate the desired skill and for the robot to efficiently learn from the…

This paper presents a safety-critical reinforcement learning framework for nonlinear dynamical systems with continuous state and input spaces operating under explicit physical constraints. Hard safety constraints are enforced independently…

Artificial intelligence (AI) and reinforcement learning (RL) have shown significant promise in wireless systems, enabling dynamic spectrum allocation, traffic management, and large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) coordination. However, their…

We consider the problem of designing controllers to guarantee safety in a class of nonlinear systems under uncertainties in the system dynamics and/or the environment. We define a class of uncertain control barrier functions (CBFs), and…

This paper proposes a safety controller for control-affine nonlinear systems with unmodelled dynamics and disturbances to improve closed-loop robustness. Uncertainty estimation-based control barrier functions (CBFs) are utilized to ensure…

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Control barrier functions (CBFs) have been demonstrated as an effective method for safety-critical control of autonomous systems. Although CBFs are simple to deploy, their design remains challenging, motivating the development of…

In this paper we seek to quantify the ability of learning to improve safety guarantees endowed by Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). In particular, we investigate how model uncertainty in the time derivative of a CBF can be reduced via…

This work provides a state-of-the-art survey of continual safe online reinforcement learning (COSRL) methods. We discuss theoretical aspects, challenges, and open questions in building continual online safe reinforcement learning…

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…

Abrupt maneuvers by surrounding vehicles (SVs) can typically lead to safety concerns and affect the task efficiency of the ego vehicle (EV), especially with model uncertainties stemming from environmental disturbances. This paper presents a…

Autonomous vehicles must navigate dynamically uncertain environments while balancing safety and efficiency. This challenge is exacerbated by unpredictable human-driven vehicle (HV) behaviors and perception inaccuracies, necessitating…

Obstacle avoidance is central to safe navigation, especially for robots with arbitrary and nonconvex geometries operating in cluttered environments. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) approaches often rely on analytic clearance…

Over the last few years, sampling-based stochastic optimal control (SOC) frameworks have shown impressive performances in reinforcement learning (RL) with applications in robotics. However, such approaches require a large amount of samples…

Increasingly demanding performance requirements for dynamical systems motivates the adoption of nonlinear and adaptive control techniques. One challenge is the nonlinearity of the resulting closed-loop system complicates verification that…

Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) seeks to address safety constraints by learning from static datasets and restricting exploration. However, these approaches heavily rely on the dataset and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios…

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

We introduce a simple but effective method for managing risk in model-based reinforcement learning with trajectory sampling that involves probabilistic safety constraints and balancing of optimism in the face of epistemic uncertainty and…

Control applications present hard operational constraints. A violation of these can result in unsafe behavior. This paper introduces Safe Interactive Model Based Learning (SiMBL), a framework to refine an existing controller and a system…