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Autonomous robotic systems are complex, hybrid, and often safety-critical; this makes their formal specification and verification uniquely challenging. Though commonly used, testing and simulation alone are insufficient to ensure the…
AI deployment in sensitive domains such as health care, credit, employment, and criminal justice is often treated as unsafe to authorize until model internals can be explained. This often leads to an excessive reliance on mechanistic…
Mathematical optimization is one of the cornerstones of modern engineering research and practice. Yet, throughout all application domains, mathematical optimization is, for the most part, considered to be a numerical discipline.…
Safety is one of the key issues preventing the deployment of reinforcement learning techniques in real-world robots. While most approaches in the Safe Reinforcement Learning area do not require prior knowledge of constraints and robot…
This tutorial paper presents recent work of the authors that extends the theory of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to address practical challenges in the synthesis of safe controllers for autonomous systems and robots. We present novel…
Robustness is a basic property of any control system. In the context of linear output regulation, it was proved that embedding an internal model of the exogenous signals is necessary and sufficient to achieve tracking of the desired…
We propose a methodology that exploits the contract formalism to characterize the continuous-time safety control problem, which is often difficult to address, in terms of a discrete-time one, for which numerous efficient solution scheme…
With the increasing complexity of software permeating critical domains such as autonomous driving, new challenges are emerging in the ways the engineering of these systems needs to be rethought. Autonomous driving is expected to continue…
In commercial robotic systems, it is common to encounter a closed inner-loop torque controller that is not user-modifiable. However, the outer-loop controller, which sends kinematic commands such as position or velocity for the inner-loop…
Classical simulations of time-dependent quantum systems are widely used in quantum control research. In particular, these simulations are commonly used to host iterative optimal control algorithms. This is convenient for algorithms that are…
Until recently, the concept of soft robot safety was an informal notion, often attributed solely to the fact that soft robots are less likely to damage their operating environment than rigid robots. As the field moves toward feedback…
In considering the reliability of numerical programs, it is normal to "limit our study to the semantics dealing with numerical precision" (Martel, 2005). On the other hand, there is a great deal of work on the reliability of programs that…
Context: Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both…
Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging technique that provides a unique real-time experience for users. VR technologies have provided revolutionary user experiences in various scenarios (e.g., training, education, product/architecture design,…
Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are the core control devices in Industrial Control Systems (ICSs), which control and monitor the underlying physical plants such as power grids. PLCs were initially designed to work in a trusted…
Learning has propelled the cutting edge of performance in robotic control to new heights, allowing robots to operate with high performance in conditions that were previously unimaginable. The majority of the work, however, assumes that the…
Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to endow systems with properties such as stability and safety, and has been deployed successfully across various domains. Despite this success, model uncertainty remains a significant challenge in…
Shared control combines human intention with autonomous decision-making. At the low level, the primary goal is to maintain safety regardless of the user's input to the system. However, existing shared control methods-based on, e.g., Model…
In formation control, an ensemble of autonomous agents is required to stabilize at a given configuration in the plane, doing so while agents are allowed to observe only a subset of the ensemble. As such, formation control provides a rich…
Long-term autonomy of robotic systems implicitly requires dependable platforms that are able to naturally handle hardware and software faults, problems in behaviors, or lack of knowledge. Model-based dependable platforms additionally…