Related papers: Quantifying the Safety of Trajectories using Peak-…

This work proposes an algorithm to bound the minimum distance between points on trajectories of a dynamical system and points on an unsafe set. Prior work on certifying safety of trajectories includes barrier and density methods, which do…

Deploying autonomous systems in safety critical settings necessitates methods to verify their safety properties. This is challenging because real-world systems may be subject to disturbances that affect their performance, but are unknown a…

We consider trajectory optimal control problems in which parameter uncertainty limits the applicability of control trajectories computed prior to travel. Hence, efficient trajectory adjustment is needed to ensure successful travel. However,…

Peak estimation bounds extreme values of a function of state along trajectories of a dynamical system. This paper focuses on extending peak estimation to continuous and discrete settings with time-independent and time-dependent uncertainty.…

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…

In order for autonomous vehicles to become a part of the Intelligent Transportation Ecosystem, they are required to guarantee a particular level of safety. For that to happen a safe vehicle control algorithms need to be developed, which…

Enforcing safety for dynamical systems is challenging, since it requires constraint satisfaction along trajectory predictions. Equivalent control constraints can be computed in the form of sets that enforce positive invariance, and can thus…

A major challenge in autonomous driving is designing control architectures that guarantee safety in all relevant driving scenarios. Given a safe desired reference trajectory for the vehicle, a trajectory following controller has to ensure…

Physical systems experience nonlinear disturbances which have the potential to disrupt desired behavior. For a particular disturbance, whether or not the system recovers from the disturbance to a desired stable equilibrium point depends on…

Inventory and queueing systems are often designed by controlling weighted combination of some time-averaged performance metrics (like cumulative holding, shortage, server-utilization or congestion costs); but real-world constraints, like…

We propose an approach to trajectory optimization for piecewise polynomial systems based on the recently proposed graphs of convex sets framework. We instantiate the framework with a convex relaxation of optimal control based on occupation…

The concept of a security index quantifies the minimum number of components that must be compromised to carry out an undetectable attack. This metric enables system operators to quantify each component's security risk and implement…

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.…

Designing provably safe control is a core problem in trustworthy autonomy. However, most prior work in this regard assumes either that the system dynamics are known or deterministic, or that the state and action space are finite,…

In this paper, we consider a multi-objective control problem for stochastic systems that seeks to minimize a cost of interest while ensuring safety. We introduce a novel measure of safety risk using the conditional value-at-risk and a set…

A probabilistic performance-oriented controller design approach based on polynomial chaos expansion and optimization is proposed for flight dynamic systems. Unlike robust control techniques where uncertainties are conservatively handled,…

Deep neural network controllers for autonomous driving have recently benefited from significant performance improvements, and have begun deployment in the real world. Prior to their widespread adoption, safety guarantees are needed on the…

Flexibility provision from active distribution grids requires efficient and robust methods of optimization and control suitable to online operation. In this paper we introduce conditions for the safe operation of feedback optimization based…

Guaranteeing safe behavior on complex autonomous systems -- from cars to walking robots -- is challenging due to the inherently high dimensional nature of these systems and the corresponding complex models that may be difficult to determine…

This paper presents an approach to deal with safety of dynamical systems in presence of multiple non-convex unsafe sets. While optimal control and model predictive control strategies can be employed in these scenarios, they suffer from high…