Related papers: The Safe Trusted Autonomy for Responsible Space Pr…
On-orbit spacecraft inspection is an important capability for enabling servicing and manufacturing missions and extending the life of spacecraft. However, as space operations become increasingly more common and complex, autonomous control…
As autonomous systems become more prevalent in the real world, it is critical to ensure they operate safely. One approach is the use of Run Time Assurance (RTA), which is a real-time safety assurance technique that monitors a primary…
The trial and error approach of reinforcement learning (RL) results in high performance across many complex tasks, but it can also lead to unsafe behavior. Run time assurance (RTA) approaches can be used to assure safety of the agent during…
Modern robotic systems, deployed across domains from industrial automation to domestic assistance, face a critical challenge: executing tasks with precision and adaptability in dynamic, unpredictable environments. To address this, we…
As the number of spacecraft on orbit continues to grow, it is challenging for human operators to constantly monitor and plan for all missions. Autonomous control methods such as reinforcement learning (RL) have the power to solve complex…
Robotic space missions have long depended on automation, defined in the 2015 NASA Technology Roadmaps as "the automatically-controlled operation of an apparatus, process, or system using a pre-planned set of instructions (e.g., a command…
A runtime assurance system (RTA) for a given plant enables the exercise of an untrusted or experimental controller while assuring safety with a backup (or safety) controller. The relevant computational design problem is to create a logic…
This research considers the problem of identifying safety constraints and developing Run Time Assurance (RTA) for Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) Tactical Autopilots that use neural network control systems (NNCS). This research studies a…
Given the cost and critical functions of satellite constellations, ensuring mission longevity and safe decommissioning is essential for space sustainability. This article presents a Model Predictive Control for spacecraft trajectory and…
The space environment around the Earth is becoming increasingly populated by both active spacecraft and space debris. To avoid potential collision events, significant improvements in Space Situational Awareness (SSA) activities and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising field to enhance robotic autonomy and decision making capabilities for space robotics, something which is challenging with traditional techniques due to stochasticity and uncertainty within the…
We introduce and open-source the Unified Autonomy Stack, a system-level solution that enables resilient autonomy across diverse aerial and ground robot morphologies. The architecture centers on three synergistic modules -- multi-modal…
Shared autonomy provides an effective framework for human-robot collaboration that takes advantage of the complementary strengths of humans and robots to achieve common goals. Many existing approaches to shared autonomy make restrictive…
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…
In the near future, autonomous space systems will compose many of the deployed spacecraft. Their tasks will involve autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations with large structures, such as inspections, assembly, and maintenance of…
Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are being increasingly deployed for commercial, civilian, and military applications. The current UAS state-of-the-art still depends on a remote human controller with robust wireless links to perform several of…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in automated inspection, delivery, and navigation tasks that require reliable autonomy. This project develops a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to enable a single UAV to…
This paper presents a novel dynamic post-shielding framework that enforces the full class of $\omega$-regular correctness properties over pre-computed probabilistic policies. This constitutes a paradigm shift from the predominant setting of…
A close partnership between people and partially autonomous machines has enabled decades of space exploration. But to further expand our horizons, our systems must become more capable. Increasing the nature and degree of autonomy - allowing…