Print Email Facebook Twitter Synthesis and Verification of Neural Control Barrier Functions for Safe Reinforcement Learning with Guarantees Title Synthesis and Verification of Neural Control Barrier Functions for Safe Reinforcement Learning with Guarantees Author Wang, Sunny (TU Delft Mechanical Engineering) Contributor Alonso-Mora, J. (mentor) Knödler, L. (graduation committee) Pek, Christian (graduation committee) Mathiesen, Frederik Baymler (graduation committee) Degree granting institution Delft University of Technology Programme Mechanical Engineering | Vehicle Engineering | Cognitive Robotics Date 2024-04-03 Abstract While learning-based control techniques often outperform classical controller designs, safety requirements limit the acceptance of such methods in many applications. Recent developments address this issue through Certified Learning (CL), which combines a learning-based controller with formal methods to provide safety guarantees. This thesis focuses on the CL based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), as CBFs have been widely used for safety-critical systems. However, it is non-trivial to design a CBF. Utilizing neural networks as CBFs hasshown great success, but it necessitates their certification as CBFs. In this work, we leverage bound propagation techniques and the Branch-and-Bound scheme to efficiently verify that a neural network satisfies the conditions to be a CBF over the continuous state space. To accelerate training, we further present a framework that embeds the verification scheme into the training loop to synthesize and verify a neural CBF simultaneously. In particular, weemploy the verification scheme to identify partitions of the state space that are not guaranteed to satisfy the CBF conditions and expand the training dataset by incorporating additional data from these partitions. The neural network is then optimized using the augmented dataset to meet the CBF conditions. We show that for a non-linear control-affine system, our framework can efficiently certify a neural network as a CBF and render a larger safe set than state-of-the-art neural CBF works. We further employ our learned neural CBF to derive a safe controller to illustrate the practical use of our framework. Subject cbfverificationsafe learning To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7fc13bf4-fc61-411a-8f60-0333cc255b4f Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights © 2024 Sunny Wang Files PDF Master_Thesis_sunny_wang.pdf 7.55 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:7fc13bf4-fc61-411a-8f60-0333cc255b4f/datastream/OBJ/view