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Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) is a popular sampling-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithm for nonlinear systems. It optimizes trajectories by sampling control sequences and averaging them. However, a key issue with MPPI is…
Safe and smooth robot motion around obstacles is an essential skill for autonomous robots, especially when operating around people and other robots. Conventionally, due to real-time operation requirements and onboard computation…
Sampling-based controllers, such as Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) methods, offer substantial flexibility but often suffer from high variance and low sample efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce a hybrid…
Balancing safety and efficiency when planning in crowded scenarios with uncertain dynamics is challenging where it is imperative to accomplish the robot's mission without incurring any safety violations. Typically, chance constraints are…
Designing provably safe control is a core problem in trustworthy autonomy. However, most prior work in this regard assumes either that the system dynamics are known or deterministic, or that the state and action space are finite,…
In real-world problems, uncertainties (e.g., errors in the measurement, precision errors) often lead to poor performance of numerical algorithms when not explicitly taken into account. This is also the case for control problems, where…
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…
Safety has become one of the main challenges of applying deep reinforcement learning to real world systems. Currently, the incorporation of external knowledge such as human oversight is the only means to prevent the agent from visiting the…
We propose a method to encourage safety in Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) via Gaussian Process (GP) regression. This framework consists of 1) a parametric MPC scheme that is employed as model-based…
In this letter, we introduce Geometric Model Predictive Path Integral (GMPPI), a sampling-based controller capable of tracking agile trajectories while avoiding obstacles. In each iteration, GMPPI generates a large number of candidate…
Many safety failures in machine learning arise when models are used to assign predictions to people (often in settings like lending, hiring, or content moderation) without accounting for how individuals can change their inputs. In this…
Autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they must achieve high performance while maintaining safety under state and input constraints. Although Model Predictive Control (MPC) provides a principled…
Driving simulators have been used in the automotive industry for many years because of their ability to perform tests in a safe, reproducible and controlled immersive virtual environment. The improved performance of the simulator and its…
Flexible robots may overcome some of the industry's major challenges, such as enabling intrinsically safe human-robot collaboration and achieving a higher payload-to-mass ratio. However, controlling flexible robots is complicated due to…
Autonomous robots commonly aim to complete a nominal behavior while minimizing a cost; this leaves them vulnerable to failure or unplanned scenarios, where a backup or contingency plan to a safe set is needed to avoid a total mission…
Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control is a widely used sampling-based approach for real-time control, valued for its flexibility in handling arbitrary dynamics and cost functions. However, it often suffers from high-frequency noise…
Roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing is a continuous processing technology essential for scalable production of thin-film materials and printed electronics, but precise control remains challenging due to subsystem interactions, nonlinearities,…
Ensuring safety is a critical requirement for autonomous systems, yet providing formal guarantees for nominal controllers remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a modular sampling-based safety filter to ensure the safety…
Optimizing trajectory costs for nonlinear control systems remains a significant challenge. Model Predictive Control (MPC), particularly sampling-based approaches such as the Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) method, has recently…
When we rely on deep-learned models for robotic perception, we must recognize that these models may behave unreliably on inputs dissimilar from the training data, compromising the closed-loop system's safety. This raises fundamental…