Related papers: Robots that Suggest Safe Alternatives
The interest in using reinforcement learning (RL) controllers in safety-critical applications such as robot navigation around pedestrians motivates the development of additional safety mechanisms. Running RL-enabled systems among uncertain…
Ensuring safety for human-interactive robotics is important due to the potential for human injury. The key challenge is defining safety in a way that accounts for the complex range of human behaviors without modeling the human as an…
A fundamental concern in real-time planning is the presence of dead-ends in the state space, from which no goal is reachable. Recently, the SafeRTS algorithm was proposed for searching in such spaces. SafeRTS exploits a user-provided…
A critical need in assistive robotics, such as assistive wheelchairs for navigation, is a need to learn task intent and safety guarantees through user interactions in order to ensure safe task performance. For tasks where the objectives…
Imitation learning is a promising paradigm for training robot agents; however, standard approaches typically require substantial data acquisition -- via numerous demonstrations or random exploration -- to ensure reliable performance.…
The ability to accurately predict others' behavior is central to the safety and efficiency of interactive robotics. Unfortunately, robots often lack access to key information on which these predictions may hinge, such as other agents'…
Self-supervised goal proposal and reaching is a key component for exploration and efficient policy learning algorithms. Such a self-supervised approach without access to any oracle goal sampling distribution requires deep exploration and…
Visuomotor policies trained via imitation learning are capable of performing challenging manipulation tasks, but are often extremely brittle to lighting, visual distractors, and object locations. These vulnerabilities can depend…
In recent years, advanced model-based and data-driven control methods are unlocking the potential of complex robotics systems, and we can expect this trend to continue at an exponential rate in the near future. However, ensuring safety with…
Safe control techniques, such as Hamilton-Jacobi reachability, provide principled methods for synthesizing safety-preserving robot policies but typically assume hand-designed state spaces and full observability. Recent work has relaxed…
Self-assessment rules play an essential role in safe and effective real-world robotic applications, which verify the feasibility of the selected action before actual execution. But how to utilize the self-assessment results to re-choose…
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…
Safety is a critical requirement for the real-world deployment of robotic systems. Unfortunately, while current robot foundation models show promising generalization capabilities across a wide variety of tasks, they fail to address safety,…
Proactivity in robot assistance refers to the robot's ability to anticipate user needs and perform assistive actions without explicit requests. This requires understanding user routines, predicting consistent activities, and actively…
When a robot autonomously performs a complex task, it frequently must balance competing objectives while maintaining safety. This becomes more difficult in uncertain environments with stochastic outcomes. Enhancing transparency in the…
For effective human-robot collaboration, a robot must align its actions with human goals, even as they change mid-task. Prior approaches often assume fixed goals, reducing goal prediction to a one-time inference. However, in real-world…
This paper puts forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials. This is indeed possible,…
Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…
In this work, we consider the problem of learning a feed-forward neural network controller to safely steer an arbitrarily shaped planar robot in a compact and obstacle-occluded workspace. Unlike existing methods that depend strongly on the…
A generalist robot equipped with learned skills must be able to perform many tasks in many different environments. However, zero-shot generalization to new settings is not always possible. When the robot encounters a new environment or…