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Model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) controllers have demonstrated promising results on various challenging non-linear control tasks. While a model-free DRL algorithm can solve unknown dynamics and high-dimensional problems, it…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Zikang Xiong , Joe Eappen , Ahmed H. Qureshi , Suresh Jagannathan

Safety and stability are two critical concerns in pursuit-evasion (PE) problems in an obstacle-rich environment. Most existing works combine control barrier functions (CBFs) and reinforcement learning (RL) to provide an efficient and safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-29 Xinyang Wang , Hongwei Zhang , Jun Xu , Shimin Wang , Martin Guay

Complex high-dimensional spaces with high Degree-of-Freedom and complicated action spaces, such as humanoid robots equipped with dexterous hands, pose significant challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, which need to wisely…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Zifeng Zhuang , Diyuan Shi , Runze Suo , Xiao He , Hongyin Zhang , Ting Wang , Shangke Lyu , Donglin Wang

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

We present a novel approach (DyNODE) that captures the underlying dynamics of a system by incorporating control in a neural ordinary differential equation framework. We conduct a systematic evaluation and comparison of our method and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-10 Victor M. Martinez Alvarez , Rareş Roşca , Cristian G. Fălcuţescu

We propose a Dynamical System (DS) approach to learn complex, possibly periodic motion plans from kinesthetic demonstrations using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODE). To ensure reactivity and robustness to disturbances, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Farhad Nawaz , Tianyu Li , Nikolai Matni , Nadia Figueroa

In a Human-Robot Cooperation (HRC) environment, safety and efficiency are the two core properties to evaluate robot performance. However, safety mechanisms usually hinder task efficiency since human intervention will cause backup motions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Gaoyuan Liu , Joris de Winter , Kelly Merckaert , Denis Steckelmacher , Ann Nowe , Bram Vanderborght

Robots capable of learning from demonstration (LfD) must exhibit stability while executing learned motion skills. To be effective in the real world, they should also remember multiple skills over time -- a capability lacking in current…

Recent advances in the reinforcement learning (RL) literature have enabled roboticists to automatically train complex policies in simulated environments. However, due to the poor sample complexity of these methods, solving RL problems using…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Tyler Westenbroek , Fernando Castaneda , Ayush Agrawal , Shankar Sastry , Koushil Sreenath

Robots often need to learn the human's reward function online, during the current interaction. This real-time learning requires fast but approximate learning rules: when the human's behavior is noisy or suboptimal, current approximations…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-05 Shaunak A. Mehta , Forrest Meng , Andrea Bajcsy , Dylan P. Losey

A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik , Eli Meirom

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been endowed with high expectations in tackling challenging manipulation tasks in an autonomous and self-directed fashion. Despite the significant strides made in the development of reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Zhenshan Bing , Aleksandr Mavrichev , Sicong Shen , Xiangtong Yao , Kejia Chen , Kai Huang , Alois Knoll

It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-14 Yixuan Wang , Simon Sinong Zhan , Ruochen Jiao , Zhilu Wang , Wanxin Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Chao Huang , Qi Zhu

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for autonomously acquiring complex behaviors from low level sensor observations. Although a large portion of deep RL research has focused on applications in video games…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Julian Ibarz , Jie Tan , Chelsea Finn , Mrinal Kalakrishnan , Peter Pastor , Sergey Levine

In this work, we study model-based reinforcement learning (RL) in unknown stabilizable linear dynamical systems. When learning a dynamical system, one needs to stabilize the unknown dynamics in order to avoid system blow-ups. We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Sahin Lale , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Babak Hassibi , Anima Anandkumar

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a naturalistic framing for learning through trial and error, which is appealing both because of its simplicity and effectiveness and because of its resemblance to how humans and animals acquire skills…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Archit Sharma , Kelvin Xu , Nikhil Sardana , Abhishek Gupta , Karol Hausman , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been successfully used to solve various robotic manipulation tasks. However, most of the existing works do not address the issue of control stability. This is in sharp contrast to the control theory…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Shahbaz Abdul Khader , Hang Yin , Pietro Falco , Danica Kragic

In safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), safety cost is typically defined as a function dependent on the immediate state and actions. In practice, safety constraints can often be non-Markovian due to the insufficient fidelity of state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Siow Meng Low , Akshat Kumar

This paper proposes an on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) control algorithm that solves the optimal regulation problem for a class of uncertain continuous-time nonlinear systems under user-defined state constraints. We formulate the safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-20 Soutrik Bandyopadhyay , Shubhendu Bhasin