Related papers: Synthesize Efficient Safety Certificates for Learn…

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods have achieved significant success in managing grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs). However, RL does not carry intrinsic guarantees of constraint satisfaction, which may lead to severe safety…

We consider controller synthesis for stochastic and partially unknown environments in which safety is essential. Specifically, we abstract the problem as a Markov decision process in which the expected performance is measured using a cost…

Force control in hydraulic actuators is notoriously difficult due to strong nonlinearities, uncertainties, and the high risks associated with unsafe exploration during learning. This paper investigates safe reinforcement learning (RL) for…

Safety-critical control tasks with high levels of uncertainty are becoming increasingly common. Typically, techniques that guarantee safety during learning and control utilize constraint-based safety certificates, which can be leveraged to…

This tutorial paper presents recent work of the authors that extends the theory of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to address practical challenges in the synthesis of safe controllers for autonomous systems and robots. We present novel…

This study proposes a safe and sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) framework to address two major challenges in developing applicable RL algorithms: satisfying safety constraints and efficiently learning with limited samples. To…

This paper presents a novel approach to reinforcement learning (RL) for control systems that provides probabilistic stability guarantees using finite data. Leveraging Lyapunov's method, we propose a probabilistic stability theorem that…

Safety filters provide modular techniques to augment potentially unsafe control inputs (e.g. from learning-based controllers or humans) with safety guarantees in the form of constraint satisfaction. In this paper, we present an improved…

Controller synthesis, including reset controller, feedback controller, and switching logic controller, provides an essential mechanism to guarantee the correctness and reliability of hybrid systems in a correct-by-construction manner.…

Merely pursuing performance may adversely affect the safety, while a conservative policy for safe exploration will degrade the performance. How to balance the safety and performance in learning-based control problems is an interesting yet…

We propose a computationally efficient approach to safe reinforcement learning (RL) for frequency regulation in power systems with high levels of variable renewable energy resources. The approach draws on set-theoretic control techniques to…

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) allow for efficient synthesis of controllers to maintain desired invariant properties of safety-critical systems. However, the problem of identifying a CBF remains an open question. As such, this paper…

In this paper, we solve the problem of finding a certified control policy that drives a robot from any given initial state and under any bounded disturbance to the desired reference trajectory, with guarantees on the convergence or bounds…

We investigate the important problem of certifying stability of reinforcement learning policies when interconnected with nonlinear dynamical systems. We show that by regulating the input-output gradients of policies, strong guarantees of…

Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL) aims to realize a safe learning process for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms by incorporating safety constraints. However, the efficacy of SRL approaches often relies on accurate function…

In recent years, formal methods have been extensively used in the design of autonomous systems. By employing mathematically rigorous techniques, formal methods can provide fully automated reasoning processes with provable safety guarantees…

Certifying the safety of nonlinear systems, through the lens of set invariance and control barrier functions (CBFs), offers a powerful method for controller synthesis, provided a CBF can be constructed. This paper draws connections between…

This paper considers the synthesis of optimal safe controllers based on density functions. We present an algorithm for robust constrained optimal control synthesis using the duality relationship between the density function and the value…

Establishing stability certificates for closed-loop systems under reinforcement learning (RL) policies is essential to move beyond empirical performance and offer guarantees of system behavior. Classical Lyapunov methods require a strict…

Robots are used increasingly often in safety-critical scenarios, such as robotic surgery or human-robot interaction. To ensure stringent performance criteria, formal controller synthesis is a promising direction to guarantee that robots…