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PhD Proposal by Christian Llanes

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Title: Reinforcement Learning-Based Control and Safety Verification for Aerial Robotics

 

Date: Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025

Time: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM ET

Location: TSRB 530

Virtual Link: Microsoft Teams

 

Christian Llanes

Robotics PhD Student

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

 

Committee:

Dr. Samuel Coogan (Advisor) - School of Electrical and Computer Engineering & School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis - School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Panagiotis Tsiotras - School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Sehoon Ha - School of Iterative Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Anirban Mazumdar - School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

 

Abstract: 

Learning-based techniques have become increasingly popular as a tool for improving autonomy of aerial robotics platforms. However, these methods typically lack safety guarantees using formal verification. We contribute to autonomy for aerial robotics by using learning-based techniques and a safe verification method for supervising unverified controllers. Specifically, we propose a navigation framework for urban air mobility and aerial robotics that uses real-time motion planning with continuous-time Q-learning, adapting an actor-critic model predictive control approach for urban air mobility, and using reachability with control barrier functions for verifying these learning-based methods. We leverage mixed monotonicity to quickly overapproximate reachable sets for aerial drone dynamics in real-time. Additionally, we explore multi-agent reinforcement learning to teach drone swarms to cooperate in a multi-agent pursuit evasion problem. Finally, we contribute software tools for the aerial robotics community for simulating hardware code for the Crazyflie nano quadrotor.

Status

  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Tatianna Richardson
  • Created:03/27/2025
  • Modified By:Tatianna Richardson
  • Modified:03/27/2025

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