Wei Xiao

Xinyang Wang, Wei Xiao, Hongwei Zhang

Most existing robust control barrier functions (CBFs) can only handle matched disturbances, restricting their applications in real-world scenarios. While some recent advances extend robust CBFs to unmatched disturbances, they heavily rely on differentiability property of disturbances, and fail to accommodate non-differentiable case for safety constraints with high relative degree.To address these limitations, this paper proposes a class of disturbance rejection CBFs (DRCBFs), including knowledge-based DRCBFs (kDRCBFs) and reciprocal-compensated DRCBFs (rDRCBFs).These two DRCBFs can strictly guarantee safety under general bounded disturbances, which includes both matched or unmatched, differentiable or non-differentiable disturbances as special cases. Moreover, no information of disturbance is needed in rDRCBFs. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed DRCBFs outperform existing robust CBFs.

Xinyang Wang, Hongwei Zhang, Shimin Wang et al.

Merely pursuing performance may adversely affect the safety, while a conservative policy for safe exploration will degrade the performance. How to balance the safety and performance in learning-based control problems is an interesting yet challenging issue. This paper aims to enhance system performance with safety guarantee in solving the reinforcement learning (RL)-based optimal control problems of nonlinear systems subject to high-relative-degree state constraints and unknown time-varying disturbance/actuator faults. First, to combine control barrier functions (CBFs) with RL, a new type of CBFs, termed high-order reciprocal control barrier function (HO-RCBF) is proposed to deal with high-relative-degree constraints during the learning process. Then, the concept of gradient similarity is proposed to quantify the relationship between the gradient of safety and the gradient of performance. Finally, gradient manipulation and adaptive mechanisms are introduced in the safe RL framework to enhance the performance with a safety guarantee. Two simulation examples illustrate that the proposed safe RL framework can address high-relative-degree constraint, enhance safety robustness and improve system performance.

Di Feng, Xiao Wei, Lars Rosenbaum et al.

Training a deep object detector for autonomous driving requires a huge amount of labeled data. While recording data via on-board sensors such as camera or LiDAR is relatively easy, annotating data is very tedious and time-consuming, especially when dealing with 3D LiDAR points or radar data. Active learning has the potential to minimize human annotation efforts while maximizing the object detector's performance. In this work, we propose an active learning method to train a LiDAR 3D object detector with the least amount of labeled training data necessary. The detector leverages 2D region proposals generated from the RGB images to reduce the search space of objects and speed up the learning process. Experiments show that our proposed method works under different uncertainty estimations and query functions, and can save up to 60% of the labeling efforts while reaching the same network performance.