Extra seminar Computer Science, Intelligent Systems - Dr. Armin Lederer, ETH Zurich Switzerland

Title: Safe Intelligent Systems for the Physical World

Abstract:

In the past decade, technological advancements have laid the foundations for robotic systems that have the potential to fundamentally change our lives. This concerns for example medical problems, where robotic devices can be attached to humans to facilitate rehabilitation or to assist them after losing sensorimotor capabilities. Other examples can be found in search and surveillance problems, where swarms of underwater and aerial vehicles can be used to explore dangerous environments. The complexity of such application scenarios and the challenging environments the robots often must execute them in poses unprecedented requirements on autonomous systems. On the one hand, they need to be intelligent such that they can adapt their behavior to uncertain and dynamically changing environments. On the other hand, the operation in a physical world generally requires these autonomous systems to fulfill high safety standards.

In this talk, we will address these challenges with a particular focus on high frequency, low level decision making by presenting a safe online learning control approach based on Gaussian process regression. The probabilistic foundation of Gaussian processes provides us with an explicit representation of the uncertainty of a learned model. This allows us to adapt the robustness of control algorithms, such that safety can be effectively ensured through continual replanning. By establishing a direct connection between data and local model uncertainty, we show that simple sampling and online learning strategies can already provide strong performance guarantees for learning control systems. To realize this beneficial behavior on resource-constrained systems, we propose computationally efficient yet guarantee-preserving approximations. The efficacy of the developed methods is illustrated using realistic simulations and real-word experiments throughout the presentation.