Game-Theoretic Safety Assurance for Human-Centered Robotic Systems

In order for autonomous systems like robots, drones, and self-driving cars to be reliably introduced into our society, they must have the ability to actively account for safety during their operation. While safety analysis has traditionally been conducted offline for controlled environments like cages on factory floors, the much higher complexity of open, human-populated spaces like our homes, cities, and roads makes it unviable to rely on common design-time assumptions, since these may be violated once the system is deployed. Instead, the next generation of robotic technologies will need to reason about safety online, constructing high-confidence assurances informed by ongoing observations of the environment and other agents, in spite of models of them being necessarily fallible.This dissertation aims to lay down the necessary foundations to enable autonomous systems to ensure their own safety in complex, changing, and uncertain environments, by explicitly reasoning about the gap between their models and the real world. It first introduces a suite of novel robust optimal control formulations and algorithmic tools that permit tractable safety analysis in time-varying, multi-agent systems, as well as safe real-time robotic navigation in partially unknown environments; these approaches are demonstrated on large-scale unmanned air traffic simulation and physical quadrotor platforms. After this, it draws on Bayesian machine learning methods to translate model-based guarantees into high-confidence assurances, monitoring the reliability of predictive models in light of changing evidence about the physical system and surrounding agents. This principle is first applied to a general safety framework allowing the use of learning-based control (e.g. reinforcement learning) for safety-critical robotic systems such as drones, and then combined with insights from cognitive science and dynamic game theory to enable safe human-centered navigation and interaction; these techniques are showcased on physical quadrotors—flying in unmodeled wind and among human pedestrians—and simulated highway driving. The dissertation ends with a discussion of challenges and opportunities ahead, including the bridging of safety analysis and reinforcement learning and the need to ``close the loop'' around learning and adaptation in order to deploy increasingly advanced autonomous systems with confidence

A systematic approach for integrated product, materials, and design-process design

Designers are challenged to manage customer, technology, and socio-economic uncertainty causing dynamic, unquenchable demands on limited resources. In this context, increased concept flexibility, referring to a designer s ability to generate concepts, is crucial. Concept flexibility can be significantly increased through the integrated design of product and material concepts. Hence, the challenge is to leverage knowledge of material structure-property relations that significantly affect system concepts for function-based, systematic design of product and materials concepts in an integrated fashion. However, having selected an integrated product and material system concept, managing complexity in embodiment design-processes is important. Facing a complex network of decisions and evolving analysis models a designer needs the flexibility to systematically generate and evaluate embodiment design-process alternatives. In order to address these challenges and respond to the primary research question of how to increase a designer s concept and design-process flexibility to enhance product creation in the conceptual and early embodiment design phases, the primary hypothesis in this dissertation is embodied as a systematic approach for integrated product, materials and design-process design. The systematic approach consists of two components i) a function-based, systematic approach to the integrated design of product and material concepts from a systems perspective, and ii) a systematic strategy to design-process generation and selection based on a decision-centric perspective and a value-of-information-based Process Performance Indicator. The systematic approach is validated using the validation-square approach that consists of theoretical and empirical validation. Empirical validation of the framework is carried out using various examples including: i) design of a reactive material containment system, and ii) design of an optoelectronic communication system.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Allen, Janet K.; Committee Member: Aidun, Cyrus K.; Committee Member: Klein, Benjamin; Committee Member: McDowell, David L.; Committee Member: Mistree, Farrokh; Committee Member: Yoder, Douglas P

World Water Development Report 4: Managing Water Under Uncertainty and Risk

Building on the comprehensive approach taken in World Water Development Reports (WWDRs) 1 and 2, and the holistic view taken in WWDR3, this fourth edition gives an account of the critical issues facing water's challenge areas and different regions and incorporates a deeper analysis of the external forces (i.e. drivers) linked to water. In doing so, the WWDR4 seeks to inform readers and raise awareness of the new threats arising from accelerated change and of the interconnected forces that create uncertainty and risk - ultimately emphasizing that these forces can be managed effectively and can even generate vital opportunities and benefits through innovative approaches to allocation, use and management of water

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen