Related papers: RADIUM: Predicting and Repairing End-to-End Robot …
Before autonomous systems can be deployed in safety-critical applications, we must be able to understand and verify the safety of these systems. For cases where the risk or cost of real-world testing is prohibitive, we propose a…
Discovering potential failures of an autonomous system is important prior to deployment. Falsification-based methods are often used to assess the safety of such systems, but the cost of running many accurate simulation can be high. The…
Deterministic methods for motion planning guarantee safety amidst uncertainty in obstacle locations by trying to restrict the robot from operating in any possible location that an obstacle could be in. Unfortunately, this can result in…
Estimating the distribution over failures is a key step in validating autonomous systems. Existing approaches focus on finding failures for a small range of initial conditions or make restrictive assumptions about the properties of the…
Safety validation is a crucial component in the development and deployment of autonomous systems, such as self-driving vehicles and robotic systems. Ensuring safe operation necessitates extensive testing and verification of control…
Differentiable simulation is a promising toolkit for fast gradient-based policy optimization and system identification. However, existing approaches to differentiable simulation have largely tackled scenarios where obtaining smooth…
Simulation-based falsification is a practical testing method to increase confidence that the system will meet safety requirements. Because full-fidelity simulations can be computationally demanding, we investigate the use of simulators with…
Recent years have witnessed impressive robotic manipulation systems driven by advances in imitation learning and generative modeling, such as diffusion- and flow-based approaches. As robot policy performance increases, so does the…
The deployment of autonomous robots in safety-critical applications requires safety guarantees. Provably safe reinforcement learning is an active field of research that aims to provide such guarantees using safeguards. These safeguards…
Safe, reliable navigation in extreme, unfamiliar terrain is required for future robotic space exploration missions. Recent generative-AI methods learn semantically aware navigation policies from large, cross-embodiment datasets, but offer…
Deploying learned robot manipulation policies in industrial settings requires rigorous pre-deployment validation, yet exhaustive testing across high-dimensional parameter spaces is intractable. We present ROBOGATE, a deployment risk…
We introduce BayesSim, a framework for robotics simulations allowing a full Bayesian treatment for the parameters of the simulator. As simulators become more sophisticated and able to represent the dynamics more accurately, fundamental…
Developing robot controllers in a simulated environment is advantageous but transferring the controllers to the target environment presents challenges, often referred to as the "sim-to-real gap". We present a method for continuous…
There is a growing need for computational tools to automatically design and verify autonomous systems, especially complex robotic systems involving perception, planning, control, and hardware in the autonomy stack. Differentiable…
With the increasing safety validation requirements for the release of a self-driving car, alternative approaches, such as simulation-based testing, are emerging in addition to conventional real-world testing. In order to rely on virtual…
We consider the problem of estimating an object's physical properties such as mass, friction, and elasticity directly from video sequences. Such a system identification problem is fundamentally ill-posed due to the loss of information…
In this paper, we describe a novel approach for checking safety specifications of a dynamical system with exogenous inputs over infinite time horizon that is guaranteed to terminate in finite time with a conclusive answer. We introduce the…
How can we reliably simulate future driving scenarios under a wide range of ego driving behaviors? Recent driving world models, developed exclusively on real-world driving data composed mainly of safe expert trajectories, struggle to follow…
We propose new sequential simulation-optimization algorithms for general convex optimization via simulation problems with high-dimensional discrete decision space. The performance of each choice of discrete decision variables is evaluated…
As autonomous robots increasingly become part of daily life, they will often encounter dynamic environments while only having limited information about their surroundings. Unfortunately, due to the possible presence of malicious dynamic…