Provably Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation in Human Environments
This addresses safety concerns for deploying RL in real-world human environments, though it is incremental as it builds on existing RL methods with added safety assurances.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring safety for robotic manipulators operating near humans by proposing a shielding mechanism that guarantees ISO-verified safety, preventing collisions and improving RL performance.
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results in the motion planning of manipulators. However, no method guarantees the safety of highly dynamic obstacles, such as humans, in RL-based manipulator control. This lack of formal safety assurances prevents the application of RL for manipulators in real-world human environments. Therefore, we propose a shielding mechanism that ensures ISO-verified human safety while training and deploying RL algorithms on manipulators. We utilize a fast reachability analysis of humans and manipulators to guarantee that the manipulator comes to a complete stop before a human is within its range. Our proposed method guarantees safety and significantly improves the RL performance by preventing episode-ending collisions. We demonstrate the performance of our proposed method in simulation using human motion capture data.