16 accepted papers
Safe navigation is essential for autonomous systems operating in hazardous environments. Traditional planning methods are effective for solving long-horizon tasks but depend on the availability of a graph representation with prede-fined distance metrics. In contrast, safe Reinforcement Learning (RL)
Scientists often search for phenomenon of interest while exploring new environments. Autonomous vehicles are deployed to explore such areas where human-operated vehicles would be costly or dangerous. Online control of autonomous vehicles for information-gathering is called adaptive sampling and can…
As autonomous systems tackle more real-world situations, mission success oftentimes cannot be guaranteed and the planner must reason about the probability of failure. Unfortunately, computing a trajectory that satisfies mission goals while constraining the probability of failure is difficult becaus…
In this paper, we consider the closed-loop control problem of nonlinear robotic systems in the presence of probabilistic uncertainties and disturbances. More precisely, we design a state feedback controller that minimizes deviations of the states of the system from the nominal state trajectories due…
We consider the motion planning problem for stochastic nonlinear systems in uncertain environments. More precisely, in this problem the robot has stochastic nonlinear dynamics and uncertain initial locations, and the environment contains multiple dynamic uncertain obstacles. Obstacles can be of arbi…
We address the risk bounded trajectory optimization problem of stochastic nonlinear robotic systems. More precisely, we consider the motion planning problem in which the robot has stochastic nonlinear dynamics and uncertain initial locations, and the environment contains multiple dynamic uncertain o…
Risk-bounded motion planning is an important yet difficult problem for safety-critical tasks. While existing mathematical programming methods offer theoretical guarantees in the context of constrained Markov decision processes, they either lack scalability in solving larger problems or produce conse…
This paper presents fast non-sampling based methods to assess the risk of trajectories for autonomous vehicles when probabilistic predictions of other agents’ futures are generated by deep neural networks (DNNs). The presented methods address a wide range of representations for uncertain predictions…
Real-world environments are inherently uncertain, and to operate safely in these environments robots must be able to plan around this uncertainty. In the context of motion planning, we desire systems that can maintain an acceptable level of safety as the robot moves, even when the exact locations of…
Humans perceive and describe their surroundings with qualitative statements (e.g., "Alice's hand is in contact with a bottle."), rather than quantitative values (e.g., 6-D poses of Alice's hand and a bottle). Qualitative spatial representation (QSR) is a framework that represents the spatial informa…
Human activity recognition is a crucial ingredient in safe and efficient human-robot collaboration. In this paper, we present a new model-based human activity recognition system called logical activity recognition system (LCARS). LCARS requires much less training data compared to learning-based work…
This paper introduces Probabilistic Chekov (p-Chekov), a chance-constrained motion planning system that can be applied to high degree-of-freedom (DOF) robots under motion uncertainty and imperfect state information. Given process and observation noise models, it can find feasible trajectories which…
Deployment of motion planning algorithms in practical applications has lagged due to their slow speed in reacting to disturbances. We believe that the best way to address this is to reuse learned planning and control information across queries. In previous work, we introduced Chekov, a reactive, int…
In this paper, we introduce 'risk contours map' that contains the risk information of different regions in uncertain environments. Risk is defined as the probability of collision of robots with obstacles in presence of probabilistic uncertainties in location, size, and geometry of obstacles. We use…
Path planning under uncertainty is a difficult and often intractable problem. Autonomous agents must model and reason about complex stochastic processes to quickly derive high quality plans. Most approaches separate the model of uncertainty from the planning; a model is selected and then a controlle…
We present an evaluation of several representative sampling-based and optimization-based motion planners, and then introduce an integrated motion planning system which incorporates recent advances in trajectory optimization into a sparse roadmap framework. Through experiments in 4 common application…