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Related papers: Reinforcement Learning for Safe Robot Control usin…

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Reinforcement learning (RL), while powerful and expressive, can often prioritize performance at the expense of safety. Yet safety violations can lead to catastrophic outcomes in real-world deployments. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Lizhi Yang , Blake Werner , Massimiliano de Sa , Aaron D. Ames

This paper addresses the challenge of safe stabilization, ensuring the system state reach the origin while avoiding unsafe regions. Existing approaches relying on smooth Lyapunov barrier functions often fail to guarantee a feasible…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-08 Jianglin Lan , Eldert van Henten , Peter Groot Koerkamp , Congcong Sun

Learning from expert demonstrations to flexibly program an autonomous system with complex behaviors or to predict an agent's behavior is a powerful tool, especially in collaborative control settings. A common method to solve this problem is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-05-15 Samuel Tesfazgi , Leonhard Sprandl , Armin Lederer , Sandra Hirche

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been recognized as a promising tool to address the challenges in real-time control of power systems. However, its deployment in real-world power systems has been hindered by a lack of formal stability…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-01 Yuanyuan Shi , Guannan Qu , Steven Low , Anima Anandkumar , Adam Wierman

Electric motors are crucial in many applications, but traditional control methods struggle with nonlinearities, parameter uncertainties, and external disturbances. Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising solution as a data-driven…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-25 Danial Kazemikia

For the task with complicated manipulation in unstructured environments, traditional hand-coded methods are ineffective, while reinforcement learning can provide more general and useful policy. Although the reinforcement learning is able to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Nan Lin , Linrui Zhang , Yuxuan Chen , Zhenrui Chen , Yujun Zhu , Ruoxi Chen , Peichen Wu , Xiaoping Chen

Reinforcement learning is showing great potentials in robotics applications, including autonomous driving, robot manipulation and locomotion. However, with complex uncertainties in the real-world environment, it is difficult to guarantee…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Minghao Han , Yuan Tian , Lixian Zhang , Jun Wang , Wei Pan

Using reinforcement learning to learn control policies is a challenge when the task is complex with potentially long horizons. Ensuring adequate but safe exploration is also crucial for controlling physical systems. In this paper, we use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Xiao Li , Calin Belta

This paper studies control synthesis for a general class of nonlinear, control-affine dynamical systems under additive disturbances and state-estimation errors. We enforce forward invariance of static and dynamic safe sets and convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-14 Kunal Garg , Dimitra Panagou

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a powerful approach for robots to learn complex, collaborative skills by combining Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) for motion and Variable Impedance Control (VIC) for compliant interaction. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Shreyas Kumar , Ravi Prakash

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-10 Chieh Tsai , Muhammad Junayed Hasan Zahed , Salim Hariri , Hossein Rastgoftar

Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of sophisticated motion planning and control for robots in uncertain environments. However, state-of-the-art deep RL approaches typically lack safety guarantees, especially when the robot and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Mahmoud Selim , Amr Alanwar , Shreyas Kousik , Grace Gao , Marco Pavone , Karl H. Johansson

Many robotic tasks require high-dimensional sensors such as cameras and Lidar to navigate complex environments, but developing certifiably safe feedback controllers around these sensors remains a challenging open problem, particularly when…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-05 Charles Dawson , Bethany Lowenkamp , Dylan Goff , Chuchu Fan

In collaborative human-robot tasks, safety requires not only avoiding collisions but also ensuring safe, intentional physical contact. We present ContactRL, a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework that directly incorporates contact…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Sundas Rafat Mulkana , Ronyu Yu , Tanaya Guha , Emma Li

Spacecraft rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) pose safety risks to high-value assets, so formal safety guarantees are critical. Yet conservative safety controllers can reduce mission efficiency. We propose a unified two-stage…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Minduli Wijayatunga , Nathan Wallace , Salah Sukkarieh , Roberto Armellin

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in generating robust locomotion policies for bipedal robots, but often suffers from tedious reward design and sensitivity to poorly shaped objectives. In this work, we propose a structured…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Kejun Li , Zachary Olkin , Yisong Yue , Aaron D. Ames

In this study, we propose a safety-critical compliant control strategy designed to strictly enforce interaction force constraints during the physical interaction of robots with unknown environments. The interaction force constraint is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Xinming Wang , Jun Yang , Jianliang Mao , Jinzhuo Liang , Shihua Li , Yunda Yan

Reinforcement learning (RL) is effective in many robotic applications, but it requires extensive exploration of the state-action space, during which behaviors can be unsafe. This significantly limits its applicability to large robots with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Mehdi Heydari Shahna , Pauli Mustalahti , Jouni Mattila

Despite impressive results, reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from slow convergence and requires a large variety of tuning strategies. In this paper, we investigate the ability of RL algorithms on simple continuous control tasks. We show…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Daniel Layeghi , Steve Tonneau , Michael Mistry

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…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-28 Xinyang Wang , Hongwei Zhang , Shimin Wang , Wei Xiao , Martin Guay