Related papers: Designing Tools with Control Confidence
We study how to safely control nonlinear control-affine systems that are corrupted with bounded non-stochastic noise, i.e., noise that is unknown a priori and that is not necessarily governed by a stochastic model. We focus on safety…
Both the design and control of a robot play equally important roles in its task performance. However, while optimal control is well studied in the machine learning and robotics community, less attention is placed on finding the optimal…
The collaboration between humans and robots re-quires a paradigm shift not only in robot perception, reasoning, and action, but also in the design of the robotic cell. This paper proposes an optimization framework for designing…
The field of engineering is shaped by the tools and methods used to solve problems. Optimization is one such class of powerful, robust, and effective engineering tools proven over decades of use. Within just a few years, generative…
Robotics and automation have the potential to significantly improve quality of life for people with assistive needs and their carers. Adoption of such technologies at this point in time is far from widespread. This paper presents a novel…
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…
While the advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning empower a new generation of autonomous systems for assisting human performance, one major concern arises from the human factors perspective: Humans have difficulty…
Tool-using agents that act in the world need to be both useful and safe. Well-calibrated model confidences can be used to weigh the risk versus reward of potential actions, but prior work shows that many models are poorly calibrated.…
As robots become ubiquitous in the workforce, it is essential that human-robot collaboration be both intuitive and adaptive. A robot's quality improves based on its ability to explicitly reason about the time-varying (i.e. learning curves)…
Developing and fielding complex systems requires proof that they are reliably correct with respect to their design and operating requirements. Especially for autonomous systems which exhibit unanticipated emergent behavior, fully…
Human-AI collaboration faces growing challenges as AI systems increasingly outperform humans on complex tasks, while humans remain responsible for orchestration, validation, and decision oversight. To address this imbalance, we introduce…
Topology optimization is widely used by engineers during the initial product development process to get a first possible geometry design. The state-of-the-art is the iterative calculation, which requires both time and computational power.…
Despite advances in dexterous hand manipulation, robotic hand design is still largely decoupled from task-driven evaluation and control, limiting systematic optimization. Existing robotic hand co-design approaches are often limited in…
A well-designed control system facilitates the functions of machine operation, maintenance and development. In addition, the overall effectiveness of the control system can be greatly enhanced by providing reliable mechanisms for…
As autonomous systems become more complex and integral in our society, the need to accurately model and safely control these systems has increased significantly. In the past decade, there has been tremendous success in using deep learning…
Building of tools--from simple prototypes to industrial-strength applications--is a pervasive activity in academic research. When proposing a new technique for software maintenance, effective tool support is typically required to…
We introduce Conformal Decision Theory, a framework for producing safe autonomous decisions despite imperfect machine learning predictions. Examples of such decisions are ubiquitous, from robot planning algorithms that rely on pedestrian…
Designing successful interactions requires identifying optimal design parameters. To do so, designers often conduct iterative user testing and exploratory trial-and-error. This involves balancing multiple objectives in a high-dimensional…
Algorithms are used to aid human decision makers by making predictions and recommending decisions. Currently, these algorithms are trained to optimize prediction accuracy. What if they were optimized to control final decisions? In this…
We present a real-time-capable set-based framework for closed-loop predictive control of autonomous systems using tools from computational geometry, dynamic programming, and convex optimization. The control architecture relies on the…