让机器人在未知环境中安全探索并互动,避免因随机扰动导致危险。
Safe Stochastic Explorer: Enabling Safe Goal Driven Exploration in Stochastic Environments and Safe Interaction with Unknown Objects
- 用高斯过程在线学习环境安全函数,利用不确定性指导探索。
- 在仿真和硬件实验中验证,能有效降低安全风险并减少不确定性。
- 适合需要在复杂未知环境里自主导航与交互的机器人系统。
在非结构化、安全关键环境中(如行星探测、仓库和家庭),自主机器人必须在缺乏先验知识的情况下安全导航并互动。现有安全控制方法(如哈密顿-雅可比可达性、控制屏障函数)依赖已知系统动力学,而现有安全探索技术常忽略真实世界中不可避免的随机性,例如探测车在未知地表打滑或家用机器人推动物体时的不可预测行为。为此,我们提出安全随机探索者(S.S.Explorer),一种面向随机动态下的安全目标驱动探索新框架。该方法通过平衡安全性与信息获取,减少对未知环境的安全不确定性。我们采用高斯过程在线学习未知安全函数,利用其预测不确定性引导信息收集动作,并提供安全违规的概率边界。首先在离散状态空间中提出方法,随后引入可扩展松弛,将该方法推广至连续状态空间。最后展示该框架如何自然应用于与多个未知物体的安全物理交互。大量仿真与示范性硬件实验验证了方法的有效性,为复杂不确定环境中实现可靠广泛机器人自主迈出重要一步。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Autonomous robots operating in unstructured, safety-critical environments, from planetary exploration to warehouses and homes, must learn to safely navigate and interact with their surroundings despite limited prior knowledge. Current methods for safe control, such as Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability and Control Barrier Functions, assume known system dynamics. Meanwhile existing safe exploration techniques often fail to account for the unavoidable stochasticity inherent when operating in unknown real world environments, such as an exploratory rover skidding over an unseen surface or a household robot pushing around unmapped objects in a pantry. To address this critical gap, we propose Safe Stochastic Explorer (S.S.Explorer) a novel framework for safe, goal-driven exploration under stochastic dynamics. Our approach strategically balances safety and information gathering to reduce uncertainty about safety in the unknown environment. We employ Gaussian Processes to learn the unknown safety function online, leveraging their predictive uncertainty to guide information-gathering actions and provide probabilistic bounds on safety violations. We first present our method for discrete state space environments and then introduce a scalable relaxation to effectively extend this approach to continuous state spaces. Finally we demonstrate how this framework can be naturally applied to ensure safe physical interaction with multiple unknown objects. Extensive validation in simulation and demonstrative hardware experiments showcase the efficacy of our method, representing a step forward toward enabling reliable widespread robot autonomy in complex, uncertain environments.
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