14 accepted papers
Reach-Avoid-Stay (RAS) tasks are essential in applications where systems must safely reach a target set and remain within it under all bounded disturbances. Existing approaches either struggle to compute the maximal robust RAS set—the set of all states from which the RAS task is achievable—or are li…
Tuning Model Predictive Control (MPC) cost weights for multiple, competing objectives is labor-intensive. Derivative-free automated methods, such as Bayesian Optimization, reduce manual effort but remain slow, while Differentiable MPC (Diff-MPC) exploits solver sensitivities for faster gradient-base
Autonomous Valet Parking (AVP) requires planning under partial observability, where parking spot availability evolves as dynamic agents enter and exit spots. Existing approaches either rely only on instantaneous spot availability or make static assumptions, thereby limiting foresight and adaptabilit…
In many applications of social navigation, existing works have shown that predicting and reasoning about human intentions can help robotic agents make safer and more socially acceptable decisions. In this work, we study this problem for autonomous valet parking (AVP), where an autonomous vehicle ego…
Navigation in dynamic environments requires autonomous systems to reason about uncertainties in the behavior of other agents. In this paper, we introduce a unified framework that combines trajectory planning with multimodal predictions and active probing to enhance decision-making under uncertainty.
Deep learning-based trajectory prediction models for autonomous driving often struggle with generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, sometimes performing worse than simple rule-based models. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework, Adaptive Prediction Ensemble (APE), w
Reliable automated driving technology is challenged by various sources of uncertainties, in particular, behavioral uncertainties of traffic agents. It is common for traffic agents to have intentions that are unknown to others, leaving an automated driving car to reason over multiple possible behavio
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently shown promising advancements in sequential decision-making tasks through task-specific fine-tuning. However, common fine-tuning methods, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)…
We present a novel mission-planning strategy for heterogeneous multi-robot teams, taking into account the specific constraints and capabilities of each robot. Our approach employs hierarchical trees to systematically break down complex missions into manageable sub-tasks. We develop specialized APIs
Smooth and safe speed planning is imperative for the successful deployment of autonomous vehicles. This paper presents a mathematical formulation for the optimal speed planning of autonomous driving, which has been validated in high-fidelity simulations and real-road demonstrations with practical co…
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must share the driving space with other drivers and often employ conservative motion planning strategies to ensure safety. These conservative strategies can negatively impact AV's performance and significantly slow traffic throughput. Therefore, to avoid conservatism, we de…
In robot learning from demonstration (LfD), a visual representation of a cost function inferred from Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides an intuitive tool for humans to quickly interpret the underlying objectives of the demonstration. The inferred cost function can be used by controllers,…
It can be difficult to autonomously produce driver behavior so that it appears natural to other traffic participants. Through Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), we can automate this process by learning the underlying reward function from human demonstrations. We propose a new IRL algorithm that l
Traditional planning and control methods could fail to find a feasible trajectory for an autonomous vehicle to execute amongst dense traffic on roads. This is because the obstacle-free volume in spacetime is very small in these scenarios for the vehicle to drive through. However, that does not mean…