Bayesian inference for data-efficient, explainable, and safe robotic motion planning: A review
University of Eastern Finland（东芬兰大学）；School of Computing（计算机学院）；Shenzhen Technology University（深圳技术大学）；College of Big Data and Internet（大数据与互联网学院）；Chengdu University of Information Technology（成都信息工程大学）；College of Blockchain industry（区块链产业学院）；College of Health Science and Environmental Engineering（健康科学与环境工程学院）
Bayesian inference has many advantages in robotic motion planning over four perspectives: The uncertainty quantification of the policy, safety (risk-aware) and optimum guarantees of robot motions, data-efficiency in training of reinforcement learning, and reducing the sim2real gap when the robot is applied to real-world tasks. However, the application of Bayesian inference in robotic motion planning is lagging behind the comprehensive theory of Bayesian inference. Further, there are no comprehensive reviews to summarize the progress of Bayesian inference to give researchers a systematic understanding in robotic motion planning. This paper first provides the probabilistic theories of Bayesian inference which are the preliminary of Bayesian inference for complex cases. Second, the Bayesian estimation is given to estimate the posterior of policies or unknown functions which are used to compute the policy. Third, the classical model-based Bayesian RL and model-free Bayesian RL algorithms for robotic motion planning are summarized, while these algorithms in complex cases are also analyzed. Fourth, the analysis of Bayesian inference in inverse RL is given to infer the reward functions in a data-efficient manner. Fifth, we systematically present the hybridization of Bayesian inference and RL which is a promising direction to improve the convergence of RL for better motion planning. Sixth, given the Bayesian inference, we present the interpretable and safe robotic motion plannings which are the hot research topic recently. Finally, all algorithms reviewed in this paper are summarized analytically as the knowledge graphs, and the future of Bayesian inference for robotic motion planning is also discussed, to pave the way for data-efficient, explainable, and safe robotic motion planning strategies for practical applications.
SafeRL-Lite: A Lightweight, Explainable, and Constrained Reinforcement Learning Library
Vision Mentors Ltd.（愿景导师有限公司）；School of Computer Science & AI, SR University（计算机科学与人工智能学院，SR大学）；Department of Computer Science, MANIT（计算机科学系，MANIT）；University of West London（西伦敦大学）
With the increasing presence of robotic systems and human-robot environments in today's society, understanding the reasoning behind actions taken by a robot is becoming more important. To increase this understanding, users are provided with explanations as to why a specific action was taken. Among other effects, these explanations improve the trust of users in their robotic partners. One option for creating these explanations is an introspection-based approach which can be used in conjunction with reinforcement learning agents to provide probabilities of success. These can in turn be used to r…
Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Federation University（澳大利亚联邦大学）；Universidad Central de Chile（智利中央大学）
Robotic systems are more present in our society everyday. In human-robot environments, it is crucial that end-users may correctly understand their robotic team-partners, in order to collaboratively complete a task. To increase action understanding, users demand more explainability about the decisions by the robot in particular situations. Recently, explainable robotic systems have emerged as an alternative focused not only on completing a task satisfactorily, but also on justifying, in a human-like manner, the reasons that lead to making a decision. In reinforcement learning scenarios, a great…
Increasing traffic demands, higher levels of automation, and communication enhancements provide novel design opportunities for future air traffic controllers (ATCs). This article presents a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) controller to aid conflict resolution for autonomous free flight. Although DRL has achieved important advancements in this field, the existing works pay little attention to the explainability and safety issues related to DRL controllers, particularly the safety under adversarial attacks. To address those two issues, we design a fully explainable DRL framework wherein …
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results in the motion planning of manipulators. However, no method guarantees the safety of highly dynamic obstacles, such as humans, in RL-based manipulator control. This lack of formal safety assurances prevents the application of RL for manipulators in real-world human environments. Therefore, we propose a shielding mechanism that ensures ISO-verified human safety while training and deploying RL algorithms on manipulators. We utilize a fast reachability analysis of humans and manipulators to guarantee that the manipulator comes to a compl…
Trustworthy and Explainable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Safe and Energy-Efficient Process Control: A Use Case in Industrial Compressed Air Systems
Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA（弗劳恩霍夫制造工程与自动化研究所）；Institute for Energy Efficiency in Production EEP, University of Stuttgart（生产能效研究所，斯图加特大学）；Institute of Industrial Manufacturing and Management IFF, University of Stuttgart（工业制造与管理研究所，斯图加特大学）
As safety violations can lead to severe consequences in real-world robotic applications, the increasing deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in robotic domains has propelled the study of safe exploration for reinforcement learning (safe RL). In this work, we propose a risk preventive training method for safe RL, which learns a statistical contrastive classifier to predict the probability of a state-action pair leading to unsafe states. Based on the predicted risk probabilities, we can collect risk preventive trajectories and reshape the reward function with risk penalties to induce safe R…
University of Piraeus（比雷埃夫斯大学）；Jožef Stefan Institute（约泽夫·斯特凡研究所）；Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School（约泽夫·斯特凡国际研究生院）
The implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems in the manufacturing domain enables higher production efficiency, outstanding performance, and safer operations, leveraging powerful tools such as deep learning and reinforcement learning techniques. Despite the high accuracy of these models, they are mostly considered black boxes: they are unintelligible to the human. Opaqueness affects trust in the system, a factor that is critical in the context of decision-making. We present an overview of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques as a means of boosting the transparency …
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Reinforcement learning (RL) for robotics is challenging due to the difficulty in hand-engineering a dense cost function, which can lead to unintended behavior, and dynamical uncertainty, which makes exploration and constraint satisfaction challenging. We address these issues with a new model-based reinforcement learning algorithm, Safety Augmented Value Estimation from Demonstrations (SAVED), which uses supervision that only identifies task completion and a modest set of suboptimal demonstrations to constrain exploration and learn efficiently while handling complex constraints. We then compare…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；Tencent Robotics X（腾讯 Robotics X）；Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学）
To accurately pour drinks into various containers is an essential skill for service robots. However, drink pouring is a dynamic process and difficult to model. Traditional deep imitation learning techniques for implementing autonomous robotic pouring have an inherent black-box effect and require a large amount of demonstration data for model training. To address these issues, an Explainable Hierarchical Imitation Learning (EHIL) method is proposed in this paper such that a robot can learn high-level general knowledge and execute low-level actions across multiple drink pouring scenarios. Moreov…
FRAC-MAS: A Safe and Explainable Multi-Agent System for Fracture Diagnosis
Dwarkadas J Sanghvi College of Engineering（德瓦卡达斯J.桑吉维工程学院）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
We present the UK Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Hub for Offshore Robotics for Certification of Assets (ORCA Hub), a 3.5 year EPSRC funded, multi-site project. The ORCA Hub vision is to use teams of robots and autonomous intelligent systems (AIS) to work on offshore energy platforms to enable cheaper, safer and more efficient working practices. The ORCA Hub will research, integrate, validate and deploy remote AIS solutions that can operate with existing and future offshore energy assets and sensors, interacting safely in autonomous or semi-autonomous modes in complex and cluttered enviro…
Fusing Perceptual Vision Experts with Multimodal LLMs for Explainable Plant Disease Diagnosis: From Benchmark Imagery to Real-World Robotic Field Validation
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；University of the Peloponnese（伯罗奔尼撒大学）；Agricultural University of Athens（雅典农业大学）
Dept. of Computing（计算机系）；Dept. of Bioengineering（生物工程系）；Data Science Institute（数据科学研究所）
Robotic systems are ever more capable of automation and fulfilment of complex tasks, particularly with reliance on recent advances in intelligent systems, deep learning and artificial intelligence. However, as robots and humans come closer in their interactions, the matter of interpretability, or explainability of robot decision-making processes for the human grows in importance. A successful interaction and collaboration will only take place through mutual understanding of underlying representations of the environment and the task at hand. This is currently a challenge in deep learning system…
A key challenge for robotic systems is to figure out the behavior of another agent. The capability to draw correct inferences is crucial to derive human behavior from examples. Processing correct inferences is especially challenging when (confounding) factors are not controlled experimentally (observational evidence). For this reason, robots that rely on inferences that are correlational risk a biased interpretation of the evidence. We propose equipping robots with the necessary tools to conduct observational studies on people. Specifically, we propose and explore the feasibility of structural…
Human-AI Interaction in Industrial Robotics: Design and Empirical Evaluation of a User Interface for Explainable AI-Based Robot Program Optimization
ArtiMinds Robotics（阿蒂迈因兹机器人公司）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Bremen（不来梅大学人工智能研究所）；wbk Institute of Production Science, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院生产科学wbk研究所）；Institute for Learning and Innovation in Networks, Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences（卡尔斯鲁厄应用科学大学网络学习与创新研究所）
Explainable AI for Safe and Trustworthy Autonomous Driving: A Systematic Review
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院）；Institute of Automotive Engineering, Technical University (TU) of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学汽车工程研究所）；School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞瓦特大学工程与物理科学学院）
RES-MR: Risk-Aware Reasoning for Explainable and Safe Medication Recommendation
Shandong Computer Science Center (National Supercomputer Center in Jinan)（山东省计算机科学中心（国家济南超级计算中心））；Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences)（齐鲁工业大学（山东省科学院））；Shandong Fundamental Research Center for Computer Science（山东省计算机科学基础研究中心）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Safe and Efficient Social Navigation through Explainable Safety Regions Based on Topological Features
Department of Applied Mathematics I, University of Seville（应用数学系，塞维利亚大学）；CNR-IEIIT Genoa, Italy（意大利热那亚CNR-IEIIT）；SUPSI, IDSIA Lugano, Switzerland（瑞士卢加诺SUPSI，IDSIA）
Safety Aware Task Planning via Large Language Models in Robotics
University of Minnesota – Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校）；Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM), Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院机器人与智能机器研究所）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教大学）
Towards Explainable, Safe Autonomous Driving with Language Embeddings for Novelty Identification and Active Learning: Framework and Experimental Analysis with Real-World Data Sets
University of California San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Laboratory for Intelligent and Safe Automobiles（智能与安全汽车实验室）
Safe and efficient collaboration among multiple robots in unstructured environments is increasingly critical in the era of Industry 4.0. However, achieving robust and autonomous collaboration among humans and other robots requires modern robotic systems to have effective proximity perception and reactive obstacle avoidance. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for reactive whole-body obstacle avoidance that ensures conflict-free robot-robot interactions even in dynamic environment. Unlike existing approaches based on Jacobian-type, sampling based or geometric techniques, our methodolo…
Safe Embodied AI for Long-horizon Tasks: A Cross-layer Analysis of Robotic Manipulation
UNIST InnoCORE AI-Space Solar Initiative（UNIST创新核心人工智能空间太阳能计划）；Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)（乌山国立科学技术研究院）；Automation and Systems Research Institute（自动化与系统研究所）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电气与计算机工程系）；Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence（人工智能跨学科项目）；LG Electronics（LG电子）
Predictive Modeling and Explainable AI for Veterinary Safety Profiles, Residue Assessment, and Health Outcomes Using Real-World Data and Physicochemical Properties
DATA Consortium and FARAD Program, Kansas State University, Olathe, KS, USA（1DATA Consortium和FARAD计划，堪萨斯州立大学）；Department of Computer Science, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA（计算机科学系，堪萨斯州立大学）；Department of Statistics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA（统计学系，堪萨斯州立大学）；Department of Mathematics, Kansas State University, Olathe, KS, USA（数学系，堪萨斯州立大学）
Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）；CWI, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science（数学与计算机科学中心）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
To reduce Operation and Maintenance (O&M) costs on offshore wind farms, wherein 80% of the O&M cost relates to deploying personnel, the offshore wind sector looks to Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI) for solutions. Barriers to Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) robotics include operational safety compliance and resilience, inhibiting the commercialization of autonomous services offshore. To address safety and resilience challenges we propose a Symbiotic System Of Systems Approach (SSOSA), reflecting the lifecycle learning and co-evolution with knowledge sharing for mutual gain of rob…
CT-SAFR: Safe and Interpretable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Autonomous Robots: A Multi-Layered Verification Framework for Trustworthy AI-Driven Robotic Decision Making
