Related papers: Safe Uncertainty-Aware Learning of Robotic Suturin…

Machine learning (ML) systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains where reliability is paramount. This thesis investigates how uncertainty estimation can enhance the safety and trustworthiness of ML, focusing on selective…

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…

Estimating and disentangling epistemic uncertainty, uncertainty that is reducible with more training data, and aleatoric uncertainty, uncertainty that is inherent to the task at hand, is critically important when applying machine learning…

In many learning based control methodologies, learning the unknown dynamic model precedes the control phase, while the aim is to control the system such that it remains in some safe region of the state space. In this work, our aim is to…

Learning-based control approaches have shown great promise in performing complex tasks directly from high-dimensional perception data for real robotic systems. Nonetheless, the learned controllers can behave unexpectedly if the trajectories…

Uncertainty in control and perception poses challenges for autonomous vehicle navigation in unstructured environments, leading to navigation failures and potential vehicle damage. This paper introduces a framework that minimizes control and…

Planning under uncertainty is a crucial capability for autonomous systems to operate reliably in uncertain and dynamic environments. The concern of safety becomes even more critical in healthcare settings where robots interact with human…

Identifying uncertainty and taking mitigating actions is crucial for safe and trustworthy reinforcement learning agents, especially when deployed in high-risk environments. In this paper, risk sensitivity is promoted in a model-based…

Model-based control requires an accurate model of the system dynamics for precisely and safely controlling the robot in complex and dynamic environments. Moreover, in the presence of variations in the operating conditions, the model should…

The ability to learn and execute optimal control policies safely is critical to realization of complex autonomy, especially where task restarts are not available and/or the systems are safety-critical. Safety requirements are often…

Medical image segmentation is a fundamental and critical step in many clinical approaches. Semi-supervised learning has been widely applied to medical image segmentation tasks since it alleviates the heavy burden of acquiring…

Shared autonomy is an enabling technology that provides users with control authority over robots that would otherwise be difficult if not impossible to directly control. Yet, standard methods make assumptions that limit their adoption in…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and continuous nonlinear control have been successfully deployed in multiple domains of complicated sequential decision-making tasks. However, given the exploration nature of the learning process and the presence…

Care-giving and assistive robotics, driven by advancements in AI, offer promising solutions to meet the growing demand for care, particularly in the context of increasing numbers of individuals requiring assistance. This creates a pressing…

Policy steering is an emerging way to adapt robot behaviors at deployment-time: a learned verifier analyzes low-level action samples proposed by a pre-trained policy (e.g., diffusion policy) and selects only those aligned with the task.…

Diffusion model-based approaches have shown promise in data-driven planning, but there are no safety guarantees, thus making it hard to be applied for safety-critical applications. To address these challenges, we propose a new method,…

Safe learning is central to AI-enabled robots where a single failure may lead to catastrophic results. Barrier-based method is one of the dominant approaches for safe robot learning. However, this method is not scalable, hard to train, and…

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,…

The paradigm of robot-assisted surgery is shifting toward data-driven autonomy, where policies learned via Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Imitation Learning (IL) enable the execution of complex tasks. However, these ``black-box" policies…

A particularly challenging problem in AI safety is providing guarantees on the behavior of high-dimensional autonomous systems. Verification approaches centered around reachability analysis fail to scale, and purely statistical approaches…