Related papers: SHIELD: Safety on Humanoids via CBFs In Expectatio…

The problem of dynamic locomotion over rough terrain requires both accurate foot placement together with an emphasis on dynamic stability. Existing approaches to this problem prioritize immediate safe foot placement over longer term dynamic…

Safety is of great importance in multi-robot navigation problems. In this paper, we propose a control barrier function (CBF) based optimizer that ensures robot safety with both high probability and flexibility, using only sensor…

Obstacle avoidance is central to safe navigation, especially for robots with arbitrary and nonconvex geometries operating in cluttered environments. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) approaches often rely on analytic clearance…

Ensuring operational safety is critical for human-to-humanoid motion imitation. This paper presents a vision-based framework that enables a humanoid robot to imitate human movements while avoiding collisions. Human skeletal keypoints are…

This paper addresses the target-pursuit problem, aiming to ensure each pursuer's safety regarding collision avoidance, sensing range, and input saturation. An input-constrained CBF is proposed to dynamically regulate the pursuer's control,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) can improve control performance by seeking to learn optimal control policies in the end-use environment for vehicles and other systems. To accomplish this, RL algorithms need to sufficiently explore the state and…

Motion mimicking, i.e., encouraging the control policy to mimic human motion, facilitates the learning of complex tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) for humanoid robots. Although standard RL frameworks demonstrate impressive locomotion…

This work combines control barrier functions (CBFs) with a whole-body controller to enable self-collision avoidance for the MIT Humanoid. Existing reactive controllers for self-collision avoidance cannot guarantee collision-free…

Learning-based quadruped controllers achieve impressive agility but typically lack formal safety guarantees under model uncertainty, perception noise, and unstructured contact conditions. We introduce SafeMind, a differentiable stochastic…

Stabilizing unsecured payloads against the inherent oscillations of dynamic bipedal locomotion remains a critical engineering bottleneck for humanoids in unstructured environments. To solve this, we introduce ReST-RL, a hierarchical…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be particularly effective in solving complex decision-making problems for a wide range of applications. Safe reinforcement learning refers to a class of constrained problems where the constraint…

Safety concerns during the operation of legged robots must be addressed to enable their widespread use. Machine learning-based control methods that use model-based constraints provide promising means to improve robot safety. This study…

In this paper, we develop a novel closed-form Control Barrier Function (CBF) and associated controller shield for the Kinematic Bicycle Model (KBM) with respect to obstacle avoidance. The proposed CBF and shield -- designed by an algorithm…

Ensuring robot safety in complex environments is a difficult task due to actuation limits, such as torque bounds. This paper presents a safety-critical control framework that leverages learning-based switching between multiple backup…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach. However, success is limited to real-world applications, because ensuring safe exploration and facilitating adequate exploitation is a challenge for controlling robotic systems with…

Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of…

Bringing dynamic robots into the wild requires a tenuous balance between performance and safety. Yet controllers designed to provide robust safety guarantees often result in conservative behavior, and tuning these controllers to find the…

Safety-critical control is essential for humanoid robots operating in complex human-centered environments, where physical safety constraints such as joint limits, self-collision avoidance, obstacle avoidance, and workspace boundaries must…

The integration of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in industrial environments, particularly warehouses, has revolutionized logistics and operational efficiency. However, ensuring the safety of human workers in dynamic, shared spaces remains…

This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordination of robots in dynamic environments. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) with the forward reachable set to guarantee the safe coordination of the robots…