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Open AccessProceedings ArticleDOI

Safe learning of regions of attraction for uncertain, nonlinear systems with Gaussian processes

TLDR
This paper considers an approach that learns the ROA from experiments on a real system, without ever leaving the true ROA and, thus, without risking safety-critical failures.
Abstract
Control theory can provide useful insights into the properties of controlled, dynamic systems. One important property of nonlinear systems is the region of attraction (ROA), a safe subset of the state space in which a given controller renders an equilibrium point asymptotically stable. The ROA is typically estimated based on a model of the system. However, since models are only an approximation of the real world, the resulting estimated safe region can contain states outside the ROA of the real system. This is not acceptable in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we consider an approach that learns the ROA from experiments on a real system, without ever leaving the true ROA and, thus, without risking safety-critical failures. Based on regularity assumptions on the model errors in terms of a Gaussian process prior, we use an underlying Lyapunov function in order to determine a region in which an equilibrium point is asymptotically stable with high probability. Moreover, we provide an algorithm to actively and safely explore the state space in order to expand the ROA estimate. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in simulation.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

A General Safety Framework for Learning-Based Control in Uncertain Robotic Systems

TL;DR: A general safety framework based on Hamilton–Jacobi reachability methods that can work in conjunction with an arbitrary learning algorithm is proposed, which proves theoretical safety guarantees combining probabilistic and worst-case analysis and demonstrates the proposed framework experimentally on a quadrotor vehicle.
Proceedings ArticleDOI

Learning-Based Model Predictive Control for Safe Exploration

TL;DR: This paper presents a learning-based model predictive control scheme that can provide provable high-probability safety guarantees and exploits regularity assumptions on the dynamics in terms of a Gaussian process prior to construct provably accurate confidence intervals on predicted trajectories.
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Learning-based Model Predictive Control for Safe Exploration and Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: In this paper, a learning-based model predictive control scheme that provides high-probability safety guarantees throughout the learning process is presented. But it does not provide any safety guarantees during the reinforcement learning process.
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Neural Lyapunov Control

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a method for learning control policies and neural network Lyapunov functions for nonlinear control problems, with provable guarantee of stability, using a falsifier that finds counterexamples to guide the learner towards solutions.
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Learning for Safety-Critical Control with Control Barrier Functions.

TL;DR: A machine learning framework utilizing Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to reduce model uncertainty as it impact the safe behavior of a system, ultimately achieving safe behavior.
References
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Book

Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning

TL;DR: The treatment is comprehensive and self-contained, targeted at researchers and students in machine learning and applied statistics, and deals with the supervised learning problem for both regression and classification.
Book

Essentials of Robust Control

TL;DR: In this article, the authors introduce linear algebraic Riccati Equations and linear systems with Ha spaces and balance model reduction, and Ha Loop Shaping, and Controller Reduction.
Proceedings Article

Gaussian Process Optimization in the Bandit Setting: No Regret and Experimental Design

TL;DR: This work analyzes GP-UCB, an intuitive upper-confidence based algorithm, and bound its cumulative regret in terms of maximal information gain, establishing a novel connection between GP optimization and experimental design and obtaining explicit sublinear regret bounds for many commonly used covariance functions.
Journal ArticleDOI

Convex Computation of the Region of Attraction of Polynomial Control Systems

TL;DR: The ROA can be computed by solving a convex linear programming (LP) problem over the space of measures and this problem can be solved approximately via a classical converging hierarchy of convex finite-dimensional linear matrix inequalities (LMIs).
Proceedings ArticleDOI

Reachability-based safe learning with Gaussian processes

TL;DR: This work proposes a novel method that uses a principled approach to learn the system's unknown dynamics based on a Gaussian process model and iteratively approximates the maximal safe set and further incorporates safety into the reinforcement learning performance metric, allowing a better integration of safety and learning.
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