GUARD: Toward a Compromise between Traditional Control and Learning for Safe Robot Systems

Abstract: This paper presents the framework \textbf{GUARD} (\textbf{G}uided robot control via \textbf{U}ncertainty attribution and prob\textbf{A}bilistic kernel optimization for \textbf{R}isk-aware \textbf{D}ecision making) that combines traditional control with an uncertainty-aware perception technique using active learning with real-time capability for safe robot collision avoidance. By doing so, this manuscript addresses the central challenge in robotics of finding a reasonable compromise between traditional methods and learning algorithms to foster the development of safe, yet efficient and flexible applications. By unifying a reactive model predictive countouring control (RMPCC) with an Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm that enables the attribution of uncertainty sources online using active learning with real-time capability via a probabilistic kernel optimization technique, \emph{GUARD} inherently handles the existing ambiguity of the term \textit{safety} that exists in robotics literature. Experimental studies indicate the high performance of \emph{GUARD}, thereby highlighting the relevance and need to broaden its applicability in future.