Fred Y. Hadaegh

Mahdi Taheri, Haeyoon Han, Soon-Jo Chung et al.

This paper develops a fault detection and identification (FDI) method for nonlinear control-affine systems under simultaneous actuator and sensor faults. We adopt a geometric approach to study the isolability of faults in the sense of the principal angles between subspaces corresponding to each actuator and sensor fault. As for the fault identification, a hybrid estimator that consists of a Luenberger-like observer with contraction guarantees is developed. Moreover, neural networks are embedded in the mentioned observer to estimate actuator and sensor faults. Considering that the training dataset for neural networks cannot be representative of every fault scenario, the last layer of each network is adapted using mirror descent-based laws. The mirror descent-based adaptive laws impose isolability conditions for fault channels and do not assume a quadratic parameter estimation space to consider the geometry of the fault subspaces. A Lyapunov-based analysis establishes that the state and parameter estimation errors are uniformly ultimately bounded. The effectiveness of our proposed FDI method is illustrated on the 3-axis attitude control system of a spacecraft.

Vrushabh Zinage, Narek Harutyunyan, Eric Verheyden et al.

Legged locomotion in unstructured environments demands not only high-performance control policies but also formal guarantees to ensure robustness under perturbations. Control methods often require carefully designed reference trajectories, which are challenging to construct in high-dimensional, contact-rich systems such as quadruped robots. In contrast, Reinforcement Learning (RL) directly learns policies that implicitly generate motion, and uniquely benefits from access to privileged information, such as full state and dynamics during training, that is not available at deployment. We present ContractionPPO, a framework for certified robust planning and control of legged robots by augmenting Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) RL with a state-dependent contraction metric layer. This approach enables the policy to maximize performance while simultaneously producing a contraction metric that certifies incremental exponential stability of the simulated closed-loop system. The metric is parameterized as a Lipschitz neural network and trained jointly with the policy, either in parallel or as an auxiliary head of the PPO backbone. While the contraction metric is not deployed during real-world execution, we derive upper bounds on the worst-case contraction rate and show that these bounds ensure the learned contraction metric generalizes from simulation to real-world deployment. Our hardware experiments on quadruped locomotion demonstrate that ContractionPPO enables robust, certifiably stable control even under strong external perturbations.

Joshua D. Ibrahim, Mahdi Taheri, Soon-Jo Chung et al.

This paper focuses on data-driven fault detection, identification, and recovery (FDIR) for nonlinear control-affine systems under actuator faults. We create a unified framework in the space of probability densities, rather than on individual trajectories, using fault-indexed Perron--Frobenius (PF) operators to predict the evolution of state distributions under different fault profiles. By leveraging the probability-flow representation of the Fokker--Planck equation, we construct deterministic PF operators that reproduce exact stochastic marginals, define forward reachable density families, and establish certifiable 2-Wasserstein bounds on the divergence between fault-driven and nominal density evolutions. These provide quantitative conditions for the detectability and identifiability of various faults. The fault-indexed operators are learned from trajectory data via flow map matching (FMM), and we demonstrate that the observable FMM residual directly bounds the approximation error of the operator in the 2-Wasserstein metric. Additionally, we co-train a contraction certificate that bounds the gap between the learned operator family, the actual fault-driven density flow, and the nominal dynamics. The operator library is then used online for continuous fault parameter fitting over a continuous parameter space to generalize the learned operators to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To carry out the recovery control, we employ reachable density propagation and Gaussian mixture covariance steering. The proposed framework is validated on a 10-state spacecraft attitude-control system with four reaction wheels.

Joshua D. Ibrahim, Mahdi Taheri, Soon-Jo Chung et al.

Fault detection and identification (FDI) is critical for maintaining the safety and reliability of systems subject to actuator and sensor faults. In this paper, the problem of FDI for nonlinear control-affine systems under simultaneous actuator and sensor faults is studied. We model fault signatures through the evolution of the probability density flow along the trajectory and characterize detectability using the 2-Wasserstein metric. In order to introduce quantifiable guarantees for fault detectability based on system parameters and fault magnitudes, we derive upper bounds on the distributional separation between nominal and faulty dynamics. The latter is achieved through a stochastic contraction analysis of probability distributions in the 2-Wasserstein metric. A data-driven FDI method is developed by means of a conditional flow-matching scheme that learns neural vector fields governing density propagation under different fault profiles. To generalize the data-driven FDI method across continuous fault magnitudes, Gaussian bridge interpolation and Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) conditioning are incorporated. The effectiveness of our proposed method is illustrated on a spacecraft attitude control system, and its performance is compared with an augmented Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) baseline. The results confirm that trajectory-based distributional analysis provides improved discrimination between fault scenarios and enables reliable data-driven FDI with a lower false alarm rate compared with the augmented EKF.

James Ragan, Fred Y. Hadaegh, Soon-Jo Chung

Monte Carlo Tree Search is a popular method for solving decision making problems. Faster implementations allow for more simulations within the same wall clock time, directly improving search performance. To this end, we present an alternative array-based implementation of the classic Upper Confidence bounds applied to Trees algorithm. Our method preserves the logic of the original algorithm, but eliminates the need for branch prediction, enabling faster performance on pipelined processors, and up to a factor of 2.8 times better scaling with search depth in our numerical simulations.