V-MORALS: Visual Morse Graph-Aided Estimation of Regions of Attraction in a Learned Latent Space
This work addresses the problem of estimating safe operating regions for robotic systems, particularly when only high-level sensor data (images) are available, which is a common challenge in real-world robotics.
This paper introduces V-MORALS, a method that estimates Regions of Attraction (ROA) for robotic systems using only image-based trajectories and a learned latent space. It successfully generates well-defined Morse Graphs from this latent space, enabling ROA computation without requiring full state knowledge.
Reachability analysis has become increasingly important in robotics to distinguish safe from unsafe states. Unfortunately, existing reachability and safety analysis methods often fall short, as they typically require known system dynamics or large datasets to estimate accurate system models, are computationally expensive, and assume full state information. A recent method, called MORALS, aims to address these shortcomings by using topological tools to estimate Regions of Attraction (ROA) in a low-dimensional latent space. However, MORALS still relies on full state knowledge and has not been studied when only sensor measurements are available. This paper presents Visual Morse Graph-Aided Estimation of Regions of Attraction in a Learned Latent Space (V-MORALS). V-MORALS takes in a dataset of image-based trajectories of a system under a given controller, and learns a latent space for reachability analysis. Using this learned latent space, our method is able to generate well-defined Morse Graphs, from which we can compute ROAs for various systems and controllers. V-MORALS provides capabilities similar to the original MORALS architecture without relying on state knowledge, and using only high-level sensor data. Our project website is at: https://v-morals.onrender.com.