Related papers: Zero-shot Transferable and Persistently Feasible S…

This work studies the design of safe control policies for large-scale non-linear systems operating in uncertain environments. In such a case, the robust control framework is a principled approach to safety that aims to maximize the…

Developing safe autonomous driving systems is a major scientific and technical challenge. Existing AI-based end-to-end solutions do not offer the necessary safety guarantees, while traditional systems engineering approaches are defeated by…

In Human-Robot Collaboration, the robot operates in a highly dynamic environment. Thus, it is pivotal to guarantee the robust stability of the system during the interaction but also a high flexibility of the robot behavior in order to…

Safe autonomous navigation in unknown environments is an important problem for mobile robots. This paper proposes techniques to learn the dynamics model of a mobile robot from trajectory data and synthesize a tracking controller with safety…

Many physical plants that are controlled by embedded systems have safety requirements that need to be respected at all times - any deviations from expected behavior can result in damage to the system (often to the physical plant), the…

Recent years have seen significant progress in the realm of robot autonomy, accompanied by the expanding reach of robotic technologies. However, the emergence of new deployment domains brings unprecedented challenges in ensuring safe…

This technical report gives an overview of our work on control algorithms dealing with redundant robot systems for achieving human-like motion characteristics. Previously, we developed a novel control law to exhibit human-motion…

Over the decades, kinematic controllers have proven to be practically useful for applications like set-point and trajectory tracking in robotic systems. To this end, we formulate a novel safety-critical paradigm for kinematic control in…

Conventional passivity-based torque controllers for manipulators are typically unconstrained, which can lead to safety violations under external perturbations. In this paper, we employ viability theory to pre-compute safe sets in the…

Human body motions can be captured as a high-dimensional continuous signal using motion sensor technologies. The resulting data can be surprisingly rich in information, even when captured from persons with limited mobility. In this work, we…

We propose a method to construct finite-state reactive controllers for systems whose interactions with their adversarial environment are modeled by infinite-duration two-player games over (possibly) infinite graphs. The proposed method…

This paper studies the problem of safe control of sampled-data systems under bounded disturbance and measurement errors with piecewise-constant controllers. To achieve this, we first propose the High-Order Doubly Robust Control Barrier…

Reinforcement learning in problems with symbolic state spaces is challenging due to the need for reasoning over long horizons. This paper presents a new approach that utilizes relational abstractions in conjunction with deep learning to…

This tutorial provides a critical review of the practical application of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in robotic safety. While the theoretical foundations of CBFs are well-established, I identify a recurring gap between the mathematical…

This paper proposes a constructive approach to safety control of nonlinear cascade systems subject to multiple state constraints. New design ingredients include a unified characterization of safety and stability for systematic designs of…

Safe operation of systems such as robots requires them to plan and execute trajectories subject to safety constraints. When those systems are subject to uncertainties in their dynamics, it is challenging to ensure that the constraints are…

The last half-decade has seen a steep rise in the number of contributions on safe learning methods for real-world robotic deployments from both the control and reinforcement learning communities. This article provides a concise but holistic…

For a broad class of nonlinear systems, we formulate the problem of guaranteeing safety with optimality under constraints. Specifically, we define controlled safety for differential inclusions with constraints on the states and the inputs.…

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…

In this paper, we study the problem of ensuring safety with a few shots of samples for partially unknown systems. We first characterize a fundamental limit when producing safe actions is not possible due to insufficient information or…