Related papers: Approximating Safety Feedback Without a Safety Ora…
Action anticipation, intent prediction, and proactive behavior are all desirable characteristics for autonomous driving policies in interactive scenarios. Paramount, however, is ensuring safety on the road -- a key challenge in doing so is…
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…
To ensure user acceptance of autonomous vehicles (AVs), control systems are being developed to mimic human drivers from demonstrations of desired driving behaviors. Imitation learning (IL) algorithms serve this purpose, but struggle to…
Model predictive control (MPC) is widely used for motion planning, particularly in autonomous driving. Real-time capability of the planner requires utilizing convex approximation of optimal control problems (OCPs) for the planner. However,…
In order to safely operate around humans, robots can employ predictive models of human motion. Unfortunately, these models cannot capture the full complexity of human behavior and necessarily introduce simplifying assumptions. As a result,…
This paper presents a tutorial and survey on Probabilistic Inference-based Model Predictive Control (PI-MPC). PI-MPC reformulates finite-horizon optimal control as inference over an optimal control distribution expressed as a Boltzmann…
The safe operation of an autonomous system is a complex endeavor, one pivotal element being its decision-making. Decision-making logic can formally be analyzed using model checking or other formal verification approaches. Yet, the…
While learning-based control techniques often outperform classical controller designs, safety requirements limit the acceptance of such methods in many applications. Recent developments address this issue through so-called predictive safety…
Robots must operate safely when deployed in novel and human-centered environments, like homes. Current safe control approaches typically assume that the safety constraints are known a priori, and thus, the robot can pre-compute a…
Robots will increasingly operate near humans that introduce uncertainties in the motion planning problem due to their complex nature. Typically, chance constraints are introduced in the planner to optimize performance while guaranteeing…
Safety-critical control using high-dimensional sensory feedback from optical data (e.g., images, point clouds) poses significant challenges in domains like autonomous driving and robotic surgery. Control can rely on low-dimensional states…
We present a data-driven optimal control framework that can be viewed as a generalization of the path integral (PI) control approach. We find iterative feedback control laws without parameterization based on probabilistic representation of…
Sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) algorithms, such as model predictive path integral (MPPI), enable approximate, gradient-free solutions to optimal control problems by drawing samples from a proposal distribution, evaluating…
This paper presents a novel online framework for safe crowd-robot interaction based on risk-sensitive stochastic optimal control, wherein the risk is modeled by the entropic risk measure. The sampling-based model predictive control relies…
The transfer of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques into real-world applications is challenged by safety requirements in the presence of physical limitations. Most RL methods, in particular the most popular algorithms, do not support…
This paper introduces a novel method for robust output-feedback model predictive control (MPC) for a class of nonlinear discrete-time systems. We propose a novel interval-valued predictor which, given an initial estimate of the state,…
Ensuring safety for human-interactive robotics is important due to the potential for human injury. The key challenge is defining safety in a way that accounts for the complex range of human behaviors without modeling the human as an…
We establish an algorithm to learn feedback maps from data for a class of robust model predictive control (MPC) problems. The algorithm accounts for the approximation errors due to the learning directly at the synthesis stage, ensuring…
The increasing use of autonomous and semi-autonomous agents in society has made it crucial to validate their safety. However, the complex scenarios in which they are used may make formal verification impossible. To address this challenge,…
Robots must satisfy safety-critical state and input constraints despite disturbances and model mismatch. We introduce a robust model predictive control (RMPC) formulation that is fast, scalable, and compatible with real-time implementation.…