Related papers: Zero-shot Transferable and Persistently Feasible S…
Safe control for control-affine systems has been extensively studied. However, due to the complexity of system dynamics, it is challenging and time-consuming to apply these methods directly to non-control-affine systems, which cover a large…
In this paper, we propose a novel safe, passive, and robust control law for mechanical systems. The proposed approach addresses safety from a physical human-robot interaction perspective, where a robot must not only stay inside a…
Finite abstractions (a.k.a. symbolic models) offer an effective scheme for approximating the complex continuous-space systems with simpler models in the discrete-space domain. A crucial aspect, however, is to establish a formal relation…
This paper studies the design of controllers for discontinuous dynamics that ensure the safety of non-smooth sets. The safe set is represented by arbitrarily nested unions and intersections of 0-superlevel sets of differentiable functions.…
Maintaining safety under adaptation has long been considered to be an important capability for autonomous systems. As these systems estimate and change the ego-model of the system dynamics, questions regarding how to develop safety…
At the intersection of dynamical systems, control theory, and formal methods lies the construction of symbolic abstractions: these typically represent simpler, finite-state models whose behavior mimics that of an underlying concrete system…
This paper presents a framework for the safety-critical control of robotic systems, when safety is defined on safe regions in the configuration space. To maintain safety, we synthesize a safe velocity based on control barrier function…
While conventional reinforcement learning focuses on designing agents that can perform one task, meta-learning aims, instead, to solve the problem of designing agents that can generalize to different tasks (e.g., environments, obstacles,…
Safe autonomy is important in many application domains, especially for applications involving interactions with humans. Existing safe control algorithms are similar to one another in the sense that: they all provide control inputs to…
A hyper-redundant robotic arm is a manipulator with many degrees of freedom, capable of executing tasks in cluttered environments where robotic arms with fewer degrees of freedom are unable to operate. This paper introduces a new method for…
Abstraction of a continuous-space model into a finite state and input dynamical model is a key step in formal controller synthesis tools. To date, these software tools have been limited to systems of modest size (typically $\leq$ 6…
Finite-state models of control systems were proposed by several researchers as a convenient mechanism to synthesize controllers enforcing complex specifications. Most techniques for the construction of such symbolic models have two main…
Finite-state abstractions are widely studied for the automated synthesis of correct-by-construction controllers for stochastic dynamical systems. However, existing abstraction methods often lead to prohibitively large finite-state models.…
As control systems grow in complexity, abstraction-based methods have become essential for designing controllers with formal guarantees. However, a key limitation of these methods is their reliance on discrete-time models, typically…
A symmetry of a dynamical system is a map that transforms one trajectory to another trajectory. We introduce a new type of abstraction for hybrid automata based on symmetries. The abstraction combines different modes in a concrete automaton…
Discrete abstractions have become a standard approach to assist control synthesis under complex specifications. Most techniques for the construction of discrete abstractions are based on sampling of both the state and time spaces, which may…
Formal control synthesis approaches over stochastic systems have received significant attention in the past few years, in view of their ability to provide provably correct controllers for complex logical specifications in an automated…
In this paper, we consider the problem of controller design using approximately bisimilar abstractions with an emphasis on safety and reachability specifications. We propose abstraction-based approaches to solve both classes of problems. We…
The paper addresses the issue of reliability of complex embedded control systems in the safety-critical environment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to design controller that (i) guarantees the safety of nonlinear physical…
Translating continuous control system models into finite automata allows us to use powerful discrete tools to synthesize controllers for complex specifications. The abstraction construction step is unfortunately hamstrung by high runtime…