Related papers: Risk-aware Control for Robots with Non-Gaussian Be…
In safety-critical systems that interface with the real world, the role of uncertainty in decision-making is pivotal, particularly in the context of machine learning models. For the secure functioning of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), it is…
In this work, we address the problem of ensuring real-time safety in autonomous robot navigation, in spatially constrained dynamic environments, by utilizing only onboard sensors. We present a real-time control architecture that integrates…
In this paper, we present an approach for quantifying the propagated uncertainty of robot systems in an online and data-driven manner. Especially in Human-Robot Collaboration, keeping track of the safety compliance during run time is…
A controller -- a software module managing hardware behavior -- is a key component of a typical robot system. While control theory gives safety guarantees for standard controller designs, the practical implementation of controllers in…
In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic approach to risk assessment of robot systems by focusing on the impact of uncertainties. While various approaches to identifying systematic hazards (e.g., bugs, design flaws, etc.) can be found in…
We propose a physics-based method to learn environmental fields (EFs) using a mobile robot. Common purely data-driven methods require prohibitively many measurements to accurately learn such complex EFs. Alternatively, physics-based models…
Safety-critical control is imperative for deploying autonomous systems in the real world. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer strong safety guarantees when accurate system and sensor models are available. However, widely used additive,…
Standard chance constrained control algorithms typically rely on the assumption that uncertainties in vehicle states obey Gaussian statistics. Highly nonlinear systems tend to disrupt Gaussianity, challenging standard chance-constrained…
The safety of mobile robots in dynamic environments is predicated on making sure that they do not collide with obstacles. In support of such safety arguments, we analyze and formally verify a series of increasingly powerful safety…
This paper considers a stochastic control framework, in which the residual model uncertainty of the dynamical system is learned using a Gaussian Process (GP). In the proposed formulation, the residual model uncertainty consists of a…
Autonomous robots that rely on deep neural network controllers pose critical challenges for safety prediction, especially under partial observability and distribution shift. Traditional model-based verification techniques are limited in…
This paper introduces a method of identifying a maximal set of safe strategies from data for stochastic systems with unknown dynamics using barrier certificates. The first step is learning the dynamics of the system via Gaussian process…
In many learning based control methodologies, learning the unknown dynamic model precedes the control phase, while the aim is to control the system such that it remains in some safe region of the state space. In this work, our aim is to…
In this paper, we present a novel probabilistic safe control framework for human-robot interaction that combines control barrier functions (CBFs) with conformal risk control to provide formal safety guarantees while considering complex…
Implementation of learning-based control remains challenging due to the absence of safety guarantees. Safe control methods have turned to model-based safety filters to address these challenges, but this is paradoxical when the ultimate goal…
This paper discusses ongoing work in demonstrating research in mobile autonomy in challenging driving scenarios. In our approach, we address fundamental technical issues to overcome critical barriers to assurance and regulation for…
This paper proposes a safety-critical control design approach for nonlinear control affine systems in the presence of matched and unmatched uncertainties. Our constructive framework couples control barrier function (CBF) theory with a new…
This paper considers safe control synthesis for dynamical systems with either probabilistic or worst-case uncertainty in both the dynamics model and the safety constraints. We formulate novel probabilistic and robust (worst-case) control…
In order to safely operate around humans, robots can employ predictive models of human motion. Unfortunately, these models cannot capture the full complexity of human behavior and necessarily introduce simplifying assumptions. As a result,…
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…