Related papers: DualGuard MPPI: Safe and Performant Optimal Contro…
Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control has emerged as a powerful sampling-based optimal control method for complex, nonlinear, and high-dimensional systems. However, directly applying MPPI to legged robotic systems presents several…
Controller design faces a trade-off between robustness and performance, and the reliability of linear controllers has caused many practitioners to focus on the former. However, there is renewed interest in improving system performance to…
Safe control designs for robotic systems remain challenging because of the difficulties of explicitly solving optimal control with nonlinear dynamics perturbed by stochastic noise. However, recent technological advances in computing devices…
This work proposes an optimal safe controller minimizing an infinite horizon cost functional subject to control barrier functions (CBFs) safety conditions. The constrained optimal control problem is reformulated as a minimization problem of…
This paper works towards unifying two popular approaches in the safety control community: Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). HJ Reachability has methods for direct construction of value functions that…
This article proposes a new safety concept: backup plan safety. The backup plan safety is defined as the ability to complete one of the alternative missions in the case of primary mission abortion. To incorporate this new safety concept in…
Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control has proven to be a powerful tool for the control of uncertain systems (such as systems subject to disturbances and systems with unmodeled dynamics). One important limitation of the baseline MPPI…
Decentralized collision avoidance is a core challenge for scalable multi-robot systems. One of the promising approaches to tackle this problem is Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) -- a framework that naturally handles arbitrary motion…
Within a robot autonomy stack, the planner and controller are typically designed separately, and serve different purposes. As such, there is often a diffusion of responsibilities when it comes to ensuring safety for the robot. We propose…
This paper introduces a control architecture for real-time and onboard control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environments with obstacles using the Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) methodology. MPPI allows the use of the full…
This paper introduces a method for Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control that optimizes sample generation towards an optimal trajectory through Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD). MPPI relies upon predictive rollout of…
Autonomous systems like aircraft and assistive robots often operate in scenarios where guaranteeing safety is critical. Methods like Hamilton-Jacobi reachability can provide guaranteed safe sets and controllers for such systems. However,…
Navigating complex, cluttered, and unstructured environments that are a priori unknown presents significant challenges for autonomous ground vehicles, particularly when operating with a limited field of view(FOV) resulting in frequent…
A new framework for formulating reachability problems with competing inputs, nonlinear dynamics and state constraints as optimal control problems is developed. Such reach-avoid problems arise in, among others, the study of safety problems…
This paper presents a reactive navigation method that leverages a Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control enhanced with spline interpolation for the control input sequence and Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD). The MPPI…
This paper presents a novel control approach for autonomous systems operating under uncertainty. We combine Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control with Covariance Steering (CS) theory to obtain a robust controller for general…
Sampling-based approaches are widely used in systems without analytic models to estimate risk or find optimal control. However, gathering sufficient data in such scenarios can be prohibitively costly. On the other hand, in many situations,…
In adaptive-sampling control, the control frequency can be adjusted during task execution. Ensuring that these changes do not jeopardize the safety of the system being controlled requires attention. We introduce robust M-step hold model…
Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is a method that provides rigorous analyses of the safety properties of dynamical systems. This method has been successfully applied to many low-dimensional dynamical system models such as coarse models of…
Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller is used to solve unconstrained optimal control problems and Control Barrier Function (CBF) is a tool to impose strict inequality constraints, a.k.a, barrier constraints. In this work, we…