Related papers: How to Evolve Safe Control Strategies
Autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) can improve safety and efficiency for safety-critical applications, but require rigorous testing before deployment. The complexity of these systems often precludes the use of formal verification and…
In this paper we present an approach to control a vehicle in a hostile environment with static obstacles and moving adversaries. The vehicle is required to satisfy a mission objective expressed as a temporal logic specification over a set…
Being able to transfer existing skills to new situations is a key capability when training robots to operate in unpredictable real-world environments. A successful transfer algorithm should not only minimize the number of samples that the…
Security verification of communication protocols in industrial and safety-critical systems is challenging because implementations are often proprietary, accessible only as black boxes, and too complex for manual modeling. As a result,…
Safely integrating unmanned aerial vehicles into civil airspace is contingent upon development of a trustworthy collision avoidance system. This paper proposes an approach whereby a parameterized resolution logic that is considered trusted…
Autonomous driving systems have witnessed a significant development during the past years thanks to the advance in machine learning-enabled sensing and decision-making algorithms. One critical challenge for their massive deployment in the…
Autonomous systems (AS) are systems that have the capability to take decisions free from direct human control. AS are increasingly being considered for adoption for applications where their behaviour may cause harm, such as when used for…
Testing is essential for verifying and validating control designs, especially in safety-critical applications. In particular, the control system governing an automated driving vehicle must be proven reliable enough for its acceptance on the…
Behavior prediction remains one of the most challenging tasks in the autonomous vehicle (AV) software stack. Forecasting the future trajectories of nearby agents plays a critical role in ensuring road safety, as it equips AVs with the…
Robotic systems are complex and safety-critical software systems. As such, they need to be tested thoroughly. Unfortunately, robot software is intrinsically hard to test compared to traditional software, mainly since the software needs to…
The design space of networked embedded systems is very large, posing challenges to the optimisation of such platforms when it comes to support applications with real-time guarantees. Recent research has shown that a number of inter-related…
The selection of an appropriate control strategy is essential for ensuring safe operation in autonomous driving. While numerous control strategies have been developed for specific driving scenarios, a comprehensive comparative assessment of…
Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…
While recent developments in autonomous vehicle (AV) technology highlight substantial progress, we lack tools for rigorous and scalable testing. Real-world testing, the $\textit{de facto}$ evaluation environment, places the public in…
We study the problem of policy repair for learning-based control policies in safety-critical settings. We consider an architecture where a high-performance learning-based control policy (e.g. one trained as a neural network) is paired with…
Automated Vehicles require exhaustive testing in simulation to detect as many safety-critical failures as possible before deployment on public roads. In this work, we focus on the core decision-making component of autonomous robots: their…
Many robot control scenarios involve assessing system robustness against a task specification. If either the controller or environment are composed of "black-box" components with unknown dynamics, we cannot rely on formal verification to…
Simulation is an indispensable tool in the development and testing of autonomous vehicles (AVs), offering an efficient and safe alternative to road testing. An outstanding challenge with simulation-based testing is the generation of…
Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…
Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…