Related papers: Risk-aware Control for Robots with Non-Gaussian Be…
Ensuring safety is a crucial challenge when deploying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world systems. We develop confidence-based safety filters, a control-theoretic approach for certifying state safety constraints for nominal policies…
Autonomous cars have to navigate in dynamic environment which can be full of uncertainties. The uncertainties can come either from sensor limitations such as occlusions and limited sensor range, or from probabilistic prediction of other…
End-to-end learning has emerged as a major paradigm for developing autonomous systems. Unfortunately, with its performance and convenience comes an even greater challenge of safety assurance. A key factor of this challenge is the absence of…
Autonomous learning has been a promising direction in control and robotics for more than a decade since data-driven learning allows to reduce the amount of engineering knowledge, which is otherwise required. However, autonomous…
This article presents novel methods for synthesizing distributionally robust stabilizing neural controllers and certificates for control systems under model uncertainty. A key challenge in designing controllers with stability guarantees for…
In this paper a new framework has been applied to the design of controllers which encompasses nonlinearity, hysteresis and arbitrary density functions of forward models and inverse controllers. Using mixture density networks, the…
As robots are being increasingly used in close proximity to humans and objects, it is imperative that robots operate safely and efficiently under real-world conditions. Yet, the environment is seldom known perfectly. Noisy sensors and…
This paper presents an algorithm to apply nonlinear control design approaches in the case of stochastic systems with partial state observation. Deterministic nonlinear control approaches are formulated under the assumption of full state…
Data-driven models are subject to model errors due to limited and noisy training data. Key to the application of such models in safety-critical domains is the quantification of their model error. Gaussian processes provide such a measure…
Autonomous navigation through unstructured and dynamically-changing environments is a complex task that continues to present many challenges for modern roboticists. In particular, legged robots typically possess manipulable asymmetric…
In this paper, we present a novel data-driven approach to quantify safety for non-linear, discrete-time stochastic systems with unknown noise distribution. We define safety as the probability that the system remains in a given region of the…
We investigate estimating a human's world belief state using a robot's observations in a dynamic, 3D, and partially observable environment. The methods are grounded in mental model theory, which posits that human decision making, contextual…
Safely deploying robots in uncertain and dynamic environments requires a systematic accounting of various risks, both within and across layers in an autonomy stack from perception to motion planning and control. Many widely used motion…
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in robotic systems presents unique safety challenges, particularly in unpredictable environments. Although LLMs, leveraging zero-shot learning, enhance human-robot interaction and…
We present a novel method of optimal robust control through quadratic programs that offers tracking stability while subject to input and state-based constraints as well as safety-critical constraints for nonlinear dynamical robotic systems…
Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to endow systems with properties such as stability and safety, and has been deployed successfully across various domains. Despite this success, model uncertainty remains a significant challenge in…
This paper addresses learning safe output feedback control laws from partial observations of expert demonstrations. We assume that a model of the system dynamics and a state estimator are available along with corresponding error bounds,…
This paper presents an adaptive online learning framework for systems with uncertain parameters to ensure safety-critical control in non-stationary environments. Our approach consists of two phases. The initial phase is centered on a novel…
The battery is a key component of autonomous robots. Its performance limits the robot's safety and reliability. Unlike liquid-fuel, a battery, as a chemical device, exhibits complicated features, including (i) capacity fade over successive…
This paper studies the problem of safe stabilization of control-affine systems under uncertainty. Our starting point is the availability of worst-case or probabilistic error descriptions for the dynamics and a control barrier function…