Related papers: Safety-Constrained Reinforcement Learning with Pos…
This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…
In collaborative human-robot tasks, safety requires not only avoiding collisions but also ensuring safe, intentional physical contact. We present ContactRL, a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework that directly incorporates contact…
Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers an attractive approach to learn control policies for high-dimensional systems, but its relatively poor sample complexity often forces training in simulated environments. Even in simulation,…
Mobile robots navigating in crowds trained using reinforcement learning are known to suffer performance degradation when faced with out-of-distribution scenarios. We propose that by properly accounting for the uncertainties of pedestrians,…
Collaborative transportation, where multiple robots collaboratively transport a payload, has garnered significant attention in recent years. While ensuring safe and high-performance inter-robot collaboration is critical for effective task…
Neural networks (NNs) are becoming increasingly popular in the design of control pipelines for autonomous systems. However, since the performance of NNs can degrade in the presence of out-of-distribution data or adversarial attacks, systems…
Collision avoidance is key for mobile robots and agents to operate safely in the real world. In this work we present SAFER, an efficient and effective collision avoidance system that is able to improve safety by correcting the control…
The interest in using reinforcement learning (RL) controllers in safety-critical applications such as robot navigation around pedestrians motivates the development of additional safety mechanisms. Running RL-enabled systems among uncertain…
Parkour poses a significant challenge for legged robots, requiring navigation through complex environments with agility and precision based on limited sensory inputs. In this work, we introduce a novel method for training end-to-end visual…
Ensuring robot safety can be challenging; user-defined constraints can miss edge cases, policies can become unsafe even when trained from safe data, and safety can be subjective. Thus, we learn about robot safety by showing policy…
Reinforcement learning (RL) can be highly effective at learning goal-reaching policies, but it typically does not provide formal guarantees that the goal will always be reached. A common approach to provide formal goal-reaching guarantees…
Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of…
Imitation learning algorithms learn viable policies by imitating an expert's behavior when reward signals are not available. Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) is a state-of-the-art algorithm for learning policies when the…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have recently made significant strides in improving network performance. Nonetheless, their practical use is still limited in the absence of safe exploration and safe decision-making. In the…
Safe operation of connected vehicle platoons under stochastic disturbances and time-delayed dynamics requires accurate quantification of rare but dangerous events, such as inter-vehicle collisions. We propose a rigorous framework for…
Risk-averse reinforcement learning (RARL) is critical for decision-making under uncertainty, which is especially valuable in high-stake applications. However, most existing works focus on risk measures, e.g., conditional value-at-risk…
Nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) is typically restricted to short, finite horizons to limit the computational burden of online optimization. As a result, global planning frameworks are frequently necessary to avoid local minima…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has had its fair share of success in contact-rich manipulation tasks but it still lags behind in benefiting from advances in robot control theory such as impedance control and stability guarantees. Recently, the…
Despite recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), its application in safety critical domains like autonomous vehicles is still challenging. Although punishing RL agents for risky situations can help to learn safe policies, it may also…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) typically asks $\textit{what}$ an agent should do. We ask $\textit{when}$ it needs to act, and show that a single policy can jointly learn control inputs and communication-efficient timing decisions under a…