Related papers: One Filter to Deploy Them All: Robust Safety for Q…

Safety-critical perception systems require both reliable uncertainty quantification and principled abstention mechanisms to maintain safety under diverse operational conditions. We present a novel dual-threshold conformalization framework…

Nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) is typically restricted to short, finite horizons to limit the computational burden of online optimization. As a result, global planning frameworks are frequently necessary to avoid local minima…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved impressive performance in robotics and autonomous systems (RAS). A key challenge to its deployment in real-life operations is the presence of spuriously unsafe DRL policies. Unexplored states…

Quadruped robots are increasingly deployed in unstructured environments. Safe locomotion in these settings requires long-horizon goal progress, passability over uneven terrain and static constraints, and collision avoidance against…

Adaptive control provides closed-loop stability and reference tracking for uncertain dynamical systems through online parameter adaptation. These properties alone, however, do not ensure safety in the sense of forward invariance of state…

Equipping quadruped robots with manipulators provides unique loco-manipulation capabilities, enabling diverse practical applications. This integration creates a more complex system that has increased difficulties in modeling and control.…

Convex free regions provide a structured and optimization-friendly representation of collision-free space for robot navigation in unknown and cluttered environments. However, existing methods typically enlarge local collision-free regions…

This paper proposes a novel learning-based control policy with strong generalizability to new environments that enables a mobile robot to navigate autonomously through spaces filled with both static obstacles and dense crowds of…

This study introduces TRANS: Terrain-aware Reinforcement learning for Agile Navigation under Social interactions, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for quadrupedal social navigation over unstructured terrains. Conventional…

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) refers to a class of techniques that aim to prevent RL algorithms from violating constraints in the process of decision-making and exploration during trial and error. In this paper, a novel model-free…

Planning safe motions for legged robots requires sophisticated safety verification tools. However, designing such tools for such complex systems is challenging due to the nonlinear and high-dimensional nature of these systems' dynamics. In…

Occlusion-aware prediction remains a critical challenge in autonomous driving due to the inherent uncertainty of unobserved regions. Existing approaches either overestimate risk based on reachable states or struggle to predict accurate…

The design process and complexity of existing safety controls are heavily determined by the geometrical properties of the environment, which affects the proof of convergence, design scalability, performance robustness, and numerical…

Natural terrain complexity often necessitates agile movements like jumping in animals to improve traversal efficiency. To enable similar capabilities in quadruped robots, complex real-time jumping maneuvers are required. Current research…

This paper presents an approach for navigation and control in unmapped environments under input and state constraints using a composite control barrier function (CBF). We consider the scenario where real-time perception feedback (e.g.,…

Guidance robots that can guide people and avoid various obstacles, could potentially be owned by more visually impaired people at a fairly low cost. Most of the previous guidance robots for the visually impaired ignored the human response…

A major challenge to deploying cyber-physical systems with learning-enabled controllers is to ensure their safety, especially in the face of changing environments that necessitate runtime knowledge acquisition. Model-checking and automated…

In safety-critical scenarios, the protection level of the autonomous navigation system is crucial for enabling mobile robots to perform safe tasks. However, existing studies on probabilistic navigation systems for robots usually perform…

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…

Some of the most challenging environments on our planet are accessible to quadrupedal animals but remain out of reach for autonomous machines. Legged locomotion can dramatically expand the operational domains of robotics. However,…