667377 event 1681746281 1681746281 Joshua Kuperman
Advisor: Prof. Evangelos Theodorou will defend a master’s thesis entitled,
Improved Exploration for Data-Driven, Safety-Embedded Differential Dynamic Programming Using 
Tolerant Barrier States and Pontryagin Differentiable Programming
On
Thursday, April 20 at 10:00 a.m.
Engineering, Science, and Mechanics Building G08
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 autonomous robotics, we combine it with 
Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP), leading to the proposed safe trajectory optimization method 
T-DBaS-DDP, which inherits the convergence 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 trajectory 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 
system 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.
Committee
•  Prof. Evangelos Theodorou – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)
•  Prof. Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis – School of Aerospace Engineering
•  Prof. Patricio A. Vela – School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
 

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