Related papers: Safety Guarantees in Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learn…
Bridging model-based safety and model-free reinforcement learning (RL) for dynamic robots is appealing since model-based methods are able to provide formal safety guarantees, while RL-based methods are able to exploit the robot agility by…
This paper studies the design of controllers for discontinuous dynamics that ensure the safety of non-smooth sets. The safe set is represented by arbitrarily nested unions and intersections of 0-superlevel sets of differentiable functions.…
Deep reinforcement learning has been applied to solve a variety of control problems in isolation. However, the learned latent representations cannot be optimally reused for other analogous tasks and/or control systems without additional…
This paper delves into designing stabilizing feedback control gains for continuous linear systems with unknown state matrix, in which the control is subject to a general structural constraint. We bring forth the ideas from reinforcement…
A runtime assurance system (RTA) for a given plant enables the exercise of an untrusted or experimental controller while assuring safety with a backup (or safety) controller. The relevant computational design problem is to create a logic…
In this work, we address the challenge of zero-shot generalization (ZSG) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where agents must adapt to entirely novel environments without additional training. We argue that understanding and utilizing…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for optimal decision-making and control but often lacks provable guarantees for safety-critical applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel recovery-based shielding framework that…
Failures are challenging for learning to control physical systems since they risk damage, time-consuming resets, and often provide little gradient information. Adding safety constraints to exploration typically requires a lot of prior…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for reachability specifications is fundamental in sequential decision-making, yet theoretical guarantees remain less explored. A recent work achieves asymptotic convergence to optimal policies. However, this…
Domain randomization has emerged as a fundamental technique in reinforcement learning (RL) to facilitate the transfer of policies from simulation to real-world robotic applications. Many existing domain randomization approaches have been…
This paper presents a risk-aware safe reinforcement learning (RL) control design for stochastic discrete-time linear systems. Rather than using a safety certifier to myopically intervene with the RL controller, a risk-informed safe…
Enforcing state-wise safety constraints is critical for the application of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world problems, such as autonomous driving and robot manipulation. However, existing safe RL methods only enforce state-wise…
This article proposes a hierarchical learning architecture for safe data-driven control in unknown environments. We consider a constrained nonlinear dynamical system and assume the availability of state-input trajectories solving control…
Recent advances in deep learning have provided new data-driven ways of controller design to replace the traditional manual synthesis and certification approaches. Employing neural network (NN) as controllers however, presents its own…
Barrier certificates are scalar functions over the state space of dynamical systems that separate all unsafe states from all reachable states. The existence of a barrier certificate formally verifies the safety of the dynamical system.…
Designing reliable decision strategies for autonomous urban driving is challenging. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automatically derive suitable behavior in uncertain environments, but it does not provide any guarantee on the…
The study of zero-shot generalisation (ZSG) in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to produce RL algorithms whose policies generalise well to novel unseen situations at deployment time, avoiding overfitting to their training environments.…
When deploying machine learning algorithms in the real world, guaranteeing safety is an essential asset. Existing safe learning approaches typically consider continuous variables, i.e., regression tasks. However, in practice, robotic…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) of robotic manipulation skills, despite its impressive successes, stands to benefit from incorporating domain knowledge from control theory. One of the most important properties that is of interest is control…
It is challenging to use reinforcement learning (RL) in cyber-physical systems due to the lack of safety guarantees during learning. Although there have been various proposals to reduce undesired behaviors during learning, most of these…