Related papers: Semi-Global Practical Extremum Seeking with Practi…
This paper studies a stochastic extremum seeking method to steer a nonholonomic vehicle to the unknown source of a static spatially distributed filed in a plane. The key challenge lies in the lack of vehicle's position information and the…
Autonomous systems have witnessed a rapid increase in their capabilities, but it remains a challenge for them to perform tasks both effectively and safely. The fact that performance and safety can sometimes be competing objectives renders…
Ensuring safety in industrial control systems usually involves imposing constraints at the design stage of the control algorithm. Enforcing constraints is challenging if the underlying functional form is unknown. The challenge can be…
This paper addresses the nonovershooting control problem for strict-feedback nonlinear systems with unknown control direction. We propose a method that integrates extremum seeking with Lie bracket-based design to achieve approximately…
This paper presents a robot control algorithm suitable for safe reactive navigation tasks in cluttered environments. The proposed approach consists of transforming the robot workspace into the \emph{ball world}, an artificial representation…
We study the problem of learning controllers for discrete-time non-linear stochastic dynamical systems with formal reach-avoid guarantees. This work presents the first method for providing formal reach-avoid guarantees, which combine and…
Switching control strategies that unite a potentially high-performance but uncertified controller and a stabilizing albeit conservative controller are shown to be able to balance safety with efficiency, but have been less studied under…
Many machine learning and optimization algorithms can be cast as instances of stochastic approximation (SA). The convergence rate of these algorithms is known to be slow, with the optimal mean squared error (MSE) of order $O(n^{-1})$. In…
Matrix completion is a well-studied problem with many machine learning applications. In practice, the problem is often solved by non-convex optimization algorithms. However, the current theoretical analysis for non-convex algorithms relies…
This paper tackles the problem of generating safe exit controllers for continuous-time systems described by stochastic differential equations (SDEs). The primary aim is to develop controllers that maximize the lower bounds of the exit…
Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have become a popular tool for enforcing set invariance in safety-critical control systems. While guaranteeing safety, most CBF approaches are myopic in the sense that they solve an optimization problem at…
Safety guarantee is essential in many engineering implementations. Reinforcement learning provides a useful way to strengthen safety. However, reinforcement learning algorithms cannot completely guarantee safety over realistic operations.…
This paper develops boundary control for freeway traffic with a downstream bottleneck. Traffic on a freeway segment with capacity drop at outlet of the segment is a common phenomenon leading to traffic bottleneck problem. The capacity drop…
We study the problem of \textit{safe control of linear dynamical systems corrupted with non-stochastic noise}, and provide an algorithm that guarantees (i) zero constraint violation of convex time-varying constraints, and (ii) bounded…
Designing hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithms that exhibit safe behaviour is not only vital for practical applications but also, facilitates a better understanding of an agent's decisions. We tackle this problem in the options…
Safety-critical applications require controllers/policies that can guarantee safety with high confidence. The control barrier function is a useful tool to guarantee safety if we have access to the ground-truth system dynamics. In practice,…
This paper focuses on the further development of the Lie bracket approximation approach for optimization and control via extremum seeking systems. Classical results in this area provide algorithms with exponential convergence rates for…
We study the safety verification problem for a class of distributed parameter systems described by partial differential equations (PDEs), i.e., the problem of checking whether the solutions of the PDE satisfy a set of constraints at a…
In this work, we explore the application of barrier states (BaS) in the realm of safe nonlinear adaptive control. Our proposed framework derives barrier states for systems with parametric uncertainty, which are augmented into the uncertain…
We consider the problem of adaptive control of a class of feedback linearizable plants with matched parametric uncertainties whose states are accessible, subject to state constraints, which often arise due to safety considerations. In this…