Title:
Differentiable and tolerant barrier states for improved exploration of safety-embedded differential dynamic programming with chance constraints

dc.contributor.advisor Theodorou, Evangelos A.
dc.contributor.author Kuperman, Joshua Ethan
dc.contributor.committeeMember Vela, Patricio A.
dc.contributor.committeeMember Vamvoudakis, Kyriakos G.
dc.contributor.department Aerospace Engineering
dc.date.accessioned 2023-05-18T17:59:07Z
dc.date.available 2023-05-18T17:59:07Z
dc.date.created 2023-05
dc.date.issued 2023-05-10
dc.date.submitted May 2023
dc.date.updated 2023-05-18T17:59:07Z
dc.description.abstract A great challenge exists at the intersection of perception and controls – integrating the uncertainty present in perception-based state and obstacle estimation into safe control and trajectory optimization. First, we present the tolerant discrete barrier state (T-DBaS), a novel safety-embedding technique for trajectory optimization with enhanced exploratory capabilities. This approach generalizes the standard discrete barrier state (DBaS) method by accommodating temporary constraint violation during the optimization process while still approximating its safety guarantees. Towards applying T-DBaS to safety-critical au- tonomous robotics, we combine it with Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP), leading to the proposed safe trajectory optimization method T-DBaS-DDP, which inherits the con- vergence and scalability properties of the solver. Despite this, the tolerant barrier function parameters require tuning to reach peak performance for a wide array of constraints. To alleviate this requirement, we tune the T-DBaS parameters with the parameterized trajec- tory optimizer Pontryagin Differentiable Programming (PDP), proposing T-DBaS-PDP, an interpretable and generalizable solver for a variety of optimal control problems. In order to integrate perception uncertainty into safe optimal control, we learn the safety of the sys- tem via gaussian processes to create an interpretable, data-driven, and safety-guaranteeable framework. We implement this framework on differential drive and quadrotor dynamics and show its improvement over hand-tuned T-DBaS-DDP.
dc.description.degree M.S.
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.identifier.uri https://hdl.handle.net/1853/72111
dc.language.iso en_US
dc.publisher Georgia Institute of Technology
dc.subject Trajectory optimization
dc.subject Safe control
dc.title Differentiable and tolerant barrier states for improved exploration of safety-embedded differential dynamic programming with chance constraints
dc.type Text
dc.type.genre Thesis
dspace.entity.type Publication
local.contributor.advisor Theodorou, Evangelos A.
local.contributor.corporatename College of Engineering
local.contributor.corporatename Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
local.relation.ispartofseries Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering
relation.isAdvisorOfPublication aa760d2f-a820-43f1-b1ea-bcb6bfab8b13
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication 7c022d60-21d5-497c-b552-95e489a06569
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication a348b767-ea7e-4789-af1f-1f1d5925fb65
relation.isSeriesOfPublication 2fef2987-f871-4c1d-acfa-e642641793f5
thesis.degree.level Masters
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