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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: La Rocca, Asia, Saveriano, Matteo, Del Prete, Andrea
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07535
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author La Rocca, Asia
Saveriano, Matteo
Del Prete, Andrea
author_facet La Rocca, Asia
Saveriano, Matteo
Del Prete, Andrea
contents Safety is often the most important requirement in robotics applications. Nonetheless, control techniques that can provide safety guarantees are still extremely rare for nonlinear systems, such as robot manipulators. A well-known tool to ensure safety is the Viability kernel, which is the largest set of states from which safety can be ensured. Unfortunately, computing such a set for a nonlinear system is extremely challenging in general. Several numerical algorithms for approximating it have been proposed in the literature, but they suffer from the curse of dimensionality. This paper presents a new approach for numerically approximating the viability kernel of robot manipulators. Our approach solves optimal control problems to compute states that are guaranteed to be on the boundary of the set. This allows us to learn directly the set boundary, therefore learning in a smaller dimensional space. Compared to the state of the art on systems up to dimension 6, our algorithm resulted to be more than 2 times as accurate for the same computation time, or 6 times as fast to reach the same accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_07535
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VBOC: Learning the Viability Boundary of a Robot Manipulator using Optimal Control
La Rocca, Asia
Saveriano, Matteo
Del Prete, Andrea
Robotics
Safety is often the most important requirement in robotics applications. Nonetheless, control techniques that can provide safety guarantees are still extremely rare for nonlinear systems, such as robot manipulators. A well-known tool to ensure safety is the Viability kernel, which is the largest set of states from which safety can be ensured. Unfortunately, computing such a set for a nonlinear system is extremely challenging in general. Several numerical algorithms for approximating it have been proposed in the literature, but they suffer from the curse of dimensionality. This paper presents a new approach for numerically approximating the viability kernel of robot manipulators. Our approach solves optimal control problems to compute states that are guaranteed to be on the boundary of the set. This allows us to learn directly the set boundary, therefore learning in a smaller dimensional space. Compared to the state of the art on systems up to dimension 6, our algorithm resulted to be more than 2 times as accurate for the same computation time, or 6 times as fast to reach the same accuracy.
title VBOC: Learning the Viability Boundary of a Robot Manipulator using Optimal Control
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07535