Learning-Based Safety-Stability-Driven Control for Safety-Critical Systems under Model Uncertainties
School of Electronics and Information Technology, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学电子与信息工程学院）；School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学数据与计算机学院）
Lei Zheng, Jiesen Pan, Rui Yang, Hui Cheng, Haifeng Hu
备注：
7 pages, 4 figures, Accepted for publication in 12th International Conference on Wireless Communications and Signal Processing (WCSP) 2020
Safety and tracking stability are crucial for safety-critical systems such as self-driving cars, autonomous mobile robots, industrial manipulators. To efficiently control safety-critical systems to ensure their safety and achieve tracking stability, accurate system dynamic models are usually required. However, accurate system models are not always available in practice. In this paper, a learning-based safety-stability-driven control (LBSC) algorithm is presented to guarantee the safety and tracking stability for nonlinear safety-critical systems subject to control input constraints under model uncertainties. Gaussian Processes (GPs) are employed to learn the model error between the nominal model and the actual system dynamics, and the estimated mean and variance of the model error are used to quantify a high-confidence uncertainty bound. Using this estimated uncertainty bound, a safety barrier constraint is devised to ensure safety, and a stability constraint is developed to achieve rapid and accurate tracking. Then the proposed LBSC method is formulated as a quadratic program incorporating the safety barrier, the stability constraint, and the control constraints. The effectiveness of the LBSC method is illustrated on the safety-critical connected cruise control (CCC) system simulator under model uncertainties.
Input-to-State Safe Backstepping: Robust Safety-Critical Control with Unmatched Uncertainties
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University（电气与计算机工程系，北卡罗来纳州立大学）；Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, California Institute of Technology（机械与土木工程系，加州理工学院）
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)（计算机科学与人工智能实验室（CSAIL））；Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)（麻省理工学院（MIT））
In this paper, we address the real-time risk-bounded safety verification problem of continuous-time state trajectories of autonomous systems in the presence of uncertain time-varying nonlinear safety constraints. Risk is defined as the probability of not satisfying the uncertain safety constraints. Existing approaches to address the safety verification problems under uncertainties either are limited to particular classes of uncertainties and safety constraints, e.g., Gaussian uncertainties and linear constraints, or rely on sampling based methods. In this paper, we provide a fast convex algori…
This paper considers safe robot mission planning in uncertain dynamical environments. This problem arises in applications such as surveillance, emergency rescue, and autonomous driving. It is a challenging problem due to modeling and integrating dynamical uncertainties into a safe planning framework, and finding a solution in a computationally tractable way. In this work, we first develop a probabilistic model for dynamical uncertainties. Then, we provide a framework to generate a path that maximizes safety for complex missions by incorporating the uncertainty model. We also devise a Monte Car…
Safe and Nonconservative Contingency Planning for Autonomous Vehicles via Online Learning-Based Reachable Set Barriers
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科学与技术大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电气与计算机工程系）
Wayne State University（韦恩州立大学）；EPSI；Danieli Automation（达涅利自动化）
The design process and complexity of existing safety controls are heavily determined by the geometrical properties of the environment, which affects the proof of convergence, design scalability, performance robustness, and numerical efficiency of the control. Hence, this paper proposes a variable structure control to isolate the environment's geometrical complexity from the control structure. A super-twisting algorithm is used to achieve accurate trajectory tracking and robust safety control. The safety control is designed solely based on distance measurement. First, a nominal safety model for…
Safe operation of systems such as robots requires them to plan and execute trajectories subject to safety constraints. When those systems are subject to uncertainties in their dynamics, it is challenging to ensure that the constraints are not violated. In this paper, we propose Safe-CDDP, a safe trajectory optimization and control approach for systems under additive uncertainties and non-linear safety constraints based on constrained differential dynamic programming (DDP). The safety of the robot during its motion is formulated as chance constraints with user-chosen probabilities of constraint…
Uncertainties in Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based perception and vehicle's motion pose challenges to the development of safe autonomous driving vehicles. In this paper, we propose a safe motion planning framework featuring the quantification and propagation of DNN-based perception uncertainties and motion uncertainties. Contributions of this work are twofold: (1) A Bayesian Deep Neural network model which detects 3D objects and quantitatively captures the associated aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties of DNNs; (2) An uncertainty-aware motion planning algorithm (PU-RRT) that accounts for uncer…
This paper addresses efficient feasibility evaluation of possible emergency landing sites, online navigation, and path following for automatic landing under engine-out failure subject to turbulent weather. The proposed Multi-level Adaptive Safety Control framework enables unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under large uncertainties to perform safety maneuvers traditionally reserved for human pilots with sufficient experience. In this framework, a simplified flight model is first used for time-efficient feasibility evaluation of a set of landing sites and trajectory generation. Then, an online pat…
Model mismatches prevail in real-world applications. Ensuring safety for systems with uncertain dynamic models is critical. However, existing robust safe controllers may not be realizable when control limits exist. And existing methods use loose over-approximation of uncertainties, leading to conservative safe controls. To address these challenges, we propose a control-limits aware robust safe control framework for bounded state-dependent uncertainties. We propose safety index synthesis to find a robust safe controller guaranteed to be realizable under control limits. And we solve for robust s…
Maintaining safety under adaptation has long been considered to be an important capability for autonomous systems. As these systems estimate and change the ego-model of the system dynamics, questions regarding how to develop safety guarantees for such systems continue to be of interest. We propose a novel robust safe control methodology that uses set-based safety constraints to make a robotic system with dynamical uncertainties safely adapt and operate in its environment. The method consists of designing a scalar energy function (safety index) for an adaptive system with parametric uncertainty…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
The problem of dynamic locomotion over rough terrain requires both accurate foot placement together with an emphasis on dynamic stability. Existing approaches to this problem prioritize immediate safe foot placement over longer term dynamic stability considerations, or relegate the coordination of foot placement and dynamic stability to heuristic methods. We propose a multi-layered locomotion framework that unifies Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) with Model Predictive Control (MPC) to simultaneously achieve safe foot placement and dynamic stability. Our approach incorporates CBF based safety …
VisionSafeEnhanced VPC: Cautious Predictive Control with Visibility Constraints under Uncertainty for Autonomous Robotic Surgery
School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University（同济大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, Peking University（北京大学先进制造与机器人学院）；MicroPort MedBot (Group) Company Ltd.（微宏医疗机器人（集团）有限公司）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学生物医学工程系）
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven（鲁汶天主教大学）；University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）
We propose a safety-guaranteed planning and control framework for unmanned surface vessels (USVs), using Gaussian processes (GPs) to learn uncertainties. The uncertainties encountered by USVs, including external disturbances and model mismatches, are potentially state-dependent, time-varying, and hard to capture with constant models. GP is a powerful learning-based tool that can be integrated with a model-based planning and control framework, which employs a Hamilton-Jacobi differential game formulation. Such a combination yields less conservative trajectories and safety-guaranteeing control s…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Trajectory planning under uncertainty is an active research topic. Previous works predict state and state estimation uncertainties along trajectories to check for collision safety. They assume either stochastic or bounded sensing uncertainties. However, GNSS pseudoranges are typically modeled to contain stochastic uncertainties with additional biases in urban environments. Thus, given bounds for the bias, the planner needs to account for both stochastic and bounded sensing uncertainties. In our prior work we presented a reachability analysis to predict state and state estimation uncertainties …
We present an online and data-driven uncertainty quantification method to enable the development of safe human-robot collaboration applications. Safety and risk assessment of systems are strongly correlated with the accuracy of measurements: Distinctive parameters are often not directly accessible via known models and must therefore be measured. However, measurements generally suffer from uncertainties due to the limited performance of sensors, even unknown environmental disturbances, or humans. In this work, we quantify these measurement uncertainties by making use of conservation measures wh…
The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
Safe navigation in real-time is challenging because engineers need to work with uncertain vehicle dynamics, variable external disturbances, and imperfect controllers. A common safety strategy is to inflate obstacles by hand-defined margins. However, arbitrary static margins often fail in more dynamic scenarios, and using worst-case assumptions is overly conservative for most settings where disturbances over time. In this work, we propose a middle ground: safety margins that adapt on-the-fly. In an offline phase, we use Monte Carlo simulations to pre-compute a library of safety margins for mult…
Robots operating in real world settings must navigate and maintain safety while interacting with many heterogeneous agents and obstacles. Multi-Agent Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have emerged as a computationally efficient tool to guarantee safety in multi-agent environments, but they assume perfect knowledge of both the robot dynamics and other agents' dynamics. While knowledge of the robot's dynamics might be reasonably well known, the heterogeneity of agents in real-world environments means there will always be considerable uncertainty in our prediction of other agents' dynamics. This wo…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
We present a novel method of optimal robust control through quadratic programs that offers tracking stability while subject to input and state-based constraints as well as safety-critical constraints for nonlinear dynamical robotic systems in the presence of model uncertainty. The proposed method formulates robust control Lyapunov and barrier functions to provide guarantees of stability and safety in the presence of model uncertainty. We evaluate our proposed control design on dynamic walking of a five-link planar bipedal robot subject to contact force constraints as well as safety-critical pr…
Extended Neural Contractive Dynamical Systems: On Multiple Tasks and Riemannian Safety Regions
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI)（博世人工智能中心）；Autonomous Learning Robots Lab, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（自主学习机器人实验室，卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Section for Cognitive Systems, Technical University of Denmark (DTU)（认知系统部门，丹麦技术大学）
Control Barrier Functions (CBF) are widely used to enforce the safety-critical constraints on nonlinear systems. Recently, these functions are being incorporated into a path planning framework to design safety-critical path planners. However, these methods fall short of providing a realistic path considering both the algorithm's run-time complexity and enforcement of the safety-critical constraints. This paper proposes a novel motion planning approach using the well-known Rapidly Exploring Random Trees (RRT) algorithm that enforces both CBF and the robot Kinodynamic constraints to generate a s…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) that solves constraint-satisfactory policies provides a promising way to the broader safety-critical applications of RL in real-world problems such as robotics. Among all safe RL approaches, model-based methods reduce training time violations further due to their high sample efficiency. However, lacking safety robustness against the model uncertainties remains an issue in safe model-based RL, especially in training time safety. In this paper, we propose a distributional reachability certificate (DRC) and its Bellman equation to address model uncertainties and c…
Differentially Flat Learning-based Model Predictive Control Using a Stability, State, and Input Constraining Safety Filter
Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（矢量人工智能研究所）；University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS)（多伦多大学航空航天研究所）；Queen’s University（女王大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Munich Institute for Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)（慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
This work applies universal adaptive control to control barrier functions to achieve forward invariance of a safe set despite the presence of unmatched parametric uncertainties. The approach combines two ideas. The first is to construct a family of control barrier functions that ensures the system is safe for all possible models. The second is to use online parameter adaptation to methodically select a control barrier function and corresponding safety controller from the allowable set. While such a combination does not necessarily yield forward invariance without additional requirements on the…
Safety is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. Recently, one-step or multi-step optimal control problems for discrete-time nonlinear dynamical system were formulated to offer tracking stability using control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) while subject to input constraints as well as safety-critical constraints using control barrier functions (CBFs). The limitations of these existing approaches are mainly about feasibility and safety. In the existing approaches, the feasibility of the optimization and the system safety cannot be enhanced at the same time theoretically. In this paper, we pro…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Reinforcement learning (RL) is promising for complicated stochastic nonlinear control problems. Without using a mathematical model, an optimal controller can be learned from data evaluated by certain performance criteria through trial-and-error. However, the data-based learning approach is notorious for not guaranteeing stability, which is the most fundamental property for any control system. In this paper, the classic Lyapunov's method is explored to analyze the uniformly ultimate boundedness stability (UUB) solely based on data without using a mathematical model. It is further shown how RL w…
