Indicators of resilience for autonomous control systems

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

As modern societies rely more on autonomous systems to facilitate daily life, assuring their safe operation is paramount. Naturally, there are many techniques available to predict and prevent system failures. However, the safety afforded by such schemes may become misaligned with the true system, which can change in unexpected ways - from partial faults to natural wear-and-tear - that subtly degrade its stability. The implications that such subtle changes have on autonomous system stability can be observed through generic indicators of resilience derived from critical slowing down, popular for anticipating catastrophic tipping points in natural systems. Here, we show how one can systematically design these generic indicators for nonlinear control systems and show how these can reflect loss of stability though simulations of canonical robotic systems wherein their proximity to instability is manipulated directly. These results are affirmed through real-world flight experiments of a quadrotor that is nudged towards instability by progressively damaging its propeller blades. Our results show that the implications of degraded resilience on closed-loop stability are evident well before they appear, for which the indicators of resilience derived here can provide an early warning.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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