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Obtaining a controlled invariant set is crucial for safety-critical control with control barrier functions (CBFs) but is non-trivial for complex nonlinear systems and constraints. Backup control barrier functions allow such sets to be constructed online in a computationally tractable manner by examining the evolution (or flow) of the system under a known backup control law. However, for systems with unmodeled disturbances, this flow cannot be directly computed, making the current methods inadequate for assuring safety in these scenarios. To address this gap, we leverage bounds on the nominal and disturbed flow to compute a forward invariant set online by ensuring safety of an expanding norm ball tube centered around the nominal system evolution. We prove that this set results in robust control constraints which guarantee safety of the disturbed system via our Disturbance-Robust Backup Control Barrier Function (DR-BCBF) solution. Additionally, the efficacy of the proposed framework is demonstrated in simulation, applied to a double integrator problem and a rigid body spacecraft rotation problem with rate constraints., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS) with ACC option. 6 pages, 4 figures

Controlling connected automated vehicles (CAVs) via vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity holds significant promise for improving fuel economy and traffic efficiency. However, to deploy CAVs and reap their benefits, their controllers must guarantee their safety. In this paper, we apply control barrier function (CBF) theory to investigate the safety of CAVs implementing connected cruise control (CCC). Specifically, we study how stability, connection architecture, and the CAV's response time impact the safety of CCC. Through safety and stability analyses, we derive stable and safe choices of control gains, and show that safe CAV operation requires plant and head-to-tail string stability in most cases. Furthermore, the reaction time of vehicles, which is represented as a first-order lag, has a detrimental effect on safety. We determine the critical value of this lag, above which safe CCC gains do not exist. To guarantee safety even with lag while preserving the benefits of CCC, we synthesize safety-critical CCC using CBFs. With the proposed safety-critical CCC, the CAV can leverage information from connected vehicles farther ahead to improve its safety. We evaluate this controller by numerical simulation using real traffic data., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures

The introduction of connected and automated vehicles (CAV) is believed to reduce congestion, enhance safety, and improve traffic efficiency. Numerous research studies have focused on controlling pure CAV platoons in fully connected automated traffic, as well as single or multiple CAVs in mixed traffic with human-driven vehicles (HVs). CAV cruising control designs have been proposed to stabilize the car-following traffic dynamics, but few studies has considered their safety impact, particularly the trade-offs between stability and safety. In this paper, we study how cooperative control strategies for CAVs can be designed to enhance the safety and smoothness of mixed traffic under varying penetrations of connectivity and automation. Considering mixed traffic where a pair of CAVs travels amongst HVs, we design cooperative feedback controllers for the pair CAVs to stabilize traffic via cooperation and, possibly, by also leveraging connectivity with HVs. The real-time safety impact of the CAV controllers is investigated using control barrier functions (CBF). We construct CBF safety constraints, based on which we propose safety-critical control designs to guarantee CAV safety, HV safety and platoon safety. Both theoretical and numerical analyses have been conducted to explore the effect of CAV cooperation and HV connectivity on stability and safety. Our results show that the cooperation of CAVs helps to stabilize the mixed traffic while safety can be guaranteed with the safety filters. Moreover, connectivity between CAVs and HVs offers additional benefits: if an HV connects to an upstream CAV (i.e., the CAV looks ahead), it helps the CAV to stabilize the upstream traffic, while if an HV connects to a downstream CAV (i.e., the CAV looks behind), the safety of this connected HV can be enhanced.

Modern autonomous systems, such as flying, legged, and wheeled robots, are generally characterized by high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics, which presents challenges for model-based safety-critical control design. Motivated by the success of reduced-order models in robotics, this paper presents a tutorial on constructive safety-critical control via reduced-order models and control barrier functions (CBFs). To this end, we provide a unified formulation of techniques in the literature that share a common foundation of constructing CBFs for complex systems from CBFs for much simpler systems. Such ideas are illustrated through formal results, simple numerical examples, and case studies of real-world systems to which these techniques have been experimentally applied., Comment: To appear in Annual Reviews in Control

Safety-critical failures often have fatal consequences in aerospace control. Control systems on aircraft, therefore, must ensure the strict satisfaction of safety constraints, preferably with formal guarantees of safe behavior. This paper establishes the safety-critical control of fixed-wing aircraft in collision avoidance and geofencing tasks. A control framework is developed wherein a run-time assurance (RTA) system modulates the nominal flight controller of the aircraft whenever necessary to prevent it from colliding with other aircraft or crossing a boundary (geofence) in space. The RTA is formulated as a safety filter using control barrier functions (CBFs) with formal guarantees of safe behavior. CBFs are constructed and compared for a nonlinear kinematic fixed-wing aircraft model. The proposed CBF-based controllers showcase the capability of safely executing simultaneous collision avoidance and geofencing, as demonstrated by simulations on the kinematic model and a high-fidelity dynamical model., Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Control System Technology. 13 pages, 7 figures

We solve the long-standing problem concerning the fate of the chiral $U(1)_A$ symmetry in QCD-like theories at high temperature in the chiral limit. We introduce a simple instanton based random matrix model that precisely reproduces the properties of the lowest part of the lattice overlap Dirac spectrum. We show that in the chiral limit the instanton gas splits into a free gas component with a density proportional to $m^{N_f}$ and a gas of instanton-antiinstanton molecules. While the latter do not influence the chiral properties, for any nonzero quark mass the free gas component produces a singular spectral peak at zero that dominates Banks-Casher type spectral sums. By calculating these we show that the difference of the pion and delta susceptibility vanishes only for three or more massless flavors, however, the chiral condensate is zero already for two massless flavors, Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of the 40th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (LATTICE2023), July 31st - August 4th, 2023, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

This paper presents a safety-critical control framework tailored for quadruped robots equipped with a roller arm, particularly when performing locomotive tasks such as autonomous robotic inspection in complex, multi-tiered environments. In this study, we consider the problem of operating a quadrupedal robot in distillation columns, locomoting on column trays and transitioning between these trays with a roller arm. To address this problem, our framework encompasses the following key elements: 1) Trajectory generation for seamless transitions between columns, 2) Foothold re-planning in regions deemed unsafe, 3) Safety-critical control incorporating control barrier functions, 4) Gait transitions based on safety levels, and 5) A low-level controller. Our comprehensive framework, comprising these components, enables autonomous and safe locomotion across multiple layers. We incorporate reduced-order and full-body models to ensure safety, integrating safety-critical control and footstep re-planning approaches. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework through practical experiments involving a quadruped robot equipped with a roller arm, successfully navigating and transitioning between different levels within the column tray structure., Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures

We present methods to constrain fermionic condensates on the level of the path integral, which grant access to the quantum effective potential in the infinite volume limit. In the case of a spontaneously broken symmetry, this potential possesses a manifestly flat region, which is inaccessible to the standard approach on the lattice. However, by constraining the appropriate order parameters such as the chiral condensate, one is then able to probe the flat region. We demonstrate our method of constraining fermionic condensates in the 2-dimensional Gross-Neveu model, which exhibits a spontaneously broken chiral symmetry. We show how the potential flattens for increasing volume and that the flat region is dominated by inhomogeneous field configurations., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, contains ancillary files with plot data; talk given at the 40th International Symposium on Lattice Field theory (LATTICE 2023) at Fermilab; July 31 - August 4 2023

We propose a new way of understanding how chiral symmetry is realized in the high temperature phase of QCD. Based on the finding that a simple free instanton gas precisely describes the details of the lowest part of the spectrum of the lattice overlap Dirac operator, we propose an instanton-based random matrix model of QCD with dynamical quarks. Simulations of this model reveal that even for small quark mass the Dirac spectral density has a singularity at the origin, caused by a dilute gas of free instantons. Even though the interaction, mediated by light dynamical quarks creates small instanton-antiinstanton molecules, those do not influence the singular part of the spectrum, and this singular part is shown to dominate Banks-Casher type sums in the chiral limit. By generalizing the Banks-Casher formula for the singular spectrum, we show that in the chiral limit the chiral condensate vanishes if there are at least two massless flavors. Our model also indicates a possible way of resolving a long-standing debate, as it suggests that for two massless quark flavors the $U(1)_{A}$ symmetry is likely to remain broken up to arbitrarily high finite temperatures., Comment: 6 pages, final published version

Ensuring robot safety in complex environments is a difficult task due to actuation limits, such as torque bounds. This paper presents a safety-critical control framework that leverages learning-based switching between multiple backup controllers to formally guarantee safety under bounded control inputs while satisfying driver intention. By leveraging backup controllers designed to uphold safety and input constraints, backup control barrier functions (BCBFs) construct implicitly defined control invariance sets via a feasible quadratic program (QP). However, BCBF performance largely depends on the design and conservativeness of the chosen backup controller, especially in our setting of human-driven vehicles in complex, e.g, off-road, conditions. While conservativeness can be reduced by using multiple backup controllers, determining when to switch is an open problem. Consequently, we develop a broadcast scheme that estimates driver intention and integrates BCBFs with multiple backup strategies for human-robot interaction. An LSTM classifier uses data inputs from the robot, human, and safety algorithms to continually choose a backup controller in real-time. We demonstrate our method's efficacy on a dual-track robot in obstacle avoidance scenarios. Our framework guarantees robot safety while adhering to driver intention., Comment: Accepted to the International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2024

The increasing complexity of control systems necessitates control laws that guarantee safety w.r.t. complex combinations of constraints. In this letter, we propose a framework to describe compositional safety specifications with control barrier functions (CBFs). The specifications are formulated as Boolean compositions of state constraints, and we propose an algorithmic way to create a single continuously differentiable CBF that captures these constraints and enables safety-critical control. We describe the properties of the proposed CBF, and we demonstrate its efficacy by numerical simulations., Comment: Accepted to the IEEE Control System Letters (L-CSS) and the 2024 American Control Conference (ACC). 6 pages, 3 figures

Connected automated vehicles have shown great potential to improve the efficiency of transportation systems in terms of passenger comfort, fuel economy, stability of driving behavior and mitigation of traffic congestions. Yet, to deploy these vehicles and leverage their benefits, the underlying algorithms must ensure their safe operation. In this paper, we address the safety of connected cruise control strategies for longitudinal car following using control barrier function (CBF) theory. In particular, we consider various safety measures such as minimum distance, time headway and time to conflict, and provide a formal analysis of these measures through the lens of CBFs. Additionally, motivated by how stability charts facilitate stable controller design, we derive safety charts for existing connected cruise controllers to identify safe choices of controller parameters. Finally, we combine the analysis of safety measures and the corresponding stability charts to synthesize safety-critical connected cruise controllers using CBFs. We verify our theoretical results by numerical simulations., Comment: Accepted to the 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. 6 pages, 5 figures

Deploying safety-critical controllers in practice necessitates the ability to modulate uncertainties in control systems. In this context, robust control barrier functions -- in a variety of forms -- have been used to obtain safety guarantees for uncertain systems. Yet the differing types of uncertainty experienced in practice have resulted in a fractured landscape of robustification -- with a variety of instantiations depending on the structure of the uncertainty. This paper proposes a framework for generalizing these variations into a single form: parameterized barrier functions (PBFs), which yield safety guarantees for a wide spectrum of uncertainty types. This leads to controllers that enforce robust safety guarantees while their conservativeness scales by the parameterization. To illustrate the generality of this approach, we show that input-to-state safety (ISSf) is a special case of the PBF framework, whereby improved safety guarantees can be given relative to ISSf., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

Guaranteeing safe behavior on complex autonomous systems -- from cars to walking robots -- is challenging due to the inherently high dimensional nature of these systems and the corresponding complex models that may be difficult to determine in practice. With this as motivation, this paper presents a safety-critical control framework that leverages reduced order models to ensure safety on the full order dynamics -- even when these models are subject to disturbances and bounded inputs (e.g., actuation limits). To handle input constraints, the backup set method is reformulated in the context of reduced order models, and conditions for the provably safe behavior of the full order system are derived. Then, the input-to-state safe backup set method is introduced to provide robustness against discrepancies between the reduced order model and the actual system. Finally, the proposed framework is demonstrated in high-fidelity simulation, where a quadrupedal robot is safely navigated around an obstacle with legged locomotion by the help of the unicycle model., Comment: Accepted to the 2023 American Control Conference (ACC). 8 pages, 3 figures

Connected automated vehicles (CAVs) have shown great potential in improving traffic throughput and stability. Although various longitudinal control strategies have been developed for CAVs to achieve string stability in mixed-autonomy traffic systems, the potential impact of these controllers on safety has not yet been fully addressed. This paper proposes safety-critical traffic control (STC) by CAVs -- a strategy that allows a CAV to stabilize the traffic behind it, while maintaining safety relative to both the preceding vehicle and the following connected human-driven vehicles (HDVs). Specifically, we utilize control barrier functions (CBFs) to impart collision-free behavior with formal safety guarantees to the closed-loop system. The safety of both the CAV and HDVs is incorporated into the framework through a quadratic program-based controller, that minimizes deviation from a nominal stabilizing traffic controller subject to CBF-based safety constraints. Considering that some state information of the following HDVs may be unavailable to the CAV, we employ state observer-based CBFs for STC. Finally, we conduct extensive numerical simulations -- that include vehicle trajectories from real data -- to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in achieving string stable and, at the same time, provably safe traffic.

It is known that contrary to expectations, the order parameter of chiral symmetry breaking, the Dirac spectral density at zero virtuality does not vanish above the critical temperature of QCD. Instead, the spectral density develops a pronounced peak at zero. We show that the spectral density in the peak has large violations of the expected volume scaling. This anomalous scaling and the statistics of these eigenmodes is consistent with them being produced by mixing instanton and antiinstanton zero modes. Consequently, we show that a nonvanishing topological usceptibility implies a finite density of eigenvalues around zero, which can have implications on the restoration of chiral symmetry above the critical temperature., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of the 39th Annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2022), August 8-13 2022, Bonn, Germany

Accomplishing safe and efficient driving is one of the predominant challenges in the controller design of connected automated vehicles (CAVs). It is often more convenient to address these goals separately and integrate the resulting controllers. In this study, we propose a controller integration scheme to fuse performance-based controllers and safety-oriented controllers safely for the longitudinal motion of a CAV. The resulting structure is compatible with a large class of controllers, and offers flexibility to design each controller individually without affecting the performance of the others. We implement the proposed safe integration scheme on a connected automated truck using an optimal-in-energy controller and a safety-oriented connected cruise controller. We validate the premise of the safe integration through experiments with a full-scale truck in two scenarios: a controlled experiment on a test track and a real-world experiment on a public highway. In both scenarios, we achieve energy efficient driving without violating safety., Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures

This paper considers mixed traffic consisting of connected automated vehicles equipped with vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity and human-driven vehicles. A control strategy is proposed for communicating pairs of connected automated vehicles, where the two vehicles regulate their longitudinal motion by responding to each other, and, at the same time, stabilize the human-driven traffic between them. Stability analysis is conducted to find stabilizing controllers, and simulations are used to show the efficacy of the proposed approach. The impact of the penetration of connectivity and automation on the string stability of traffic is quantified. It is shown that, even with moderate penetration, connected automated vehicle pairs executing the proposed controllers achieve significant benefits compared to when these vehicles are disconnected and controlled independently., Comment: Accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. 11 pages, 10 figures

In this paper, we analyse the celebrated Haken-Kelso-Bunz (HKB) model, describing the dynamics of bimanual coordination, in the presence of delay. We study the linear dynamics, stability, nonlinear behaviour and bifurcations of this model by both theoretical and numerical analysis. We calculate in-phase and anti-phase limit cycles as well as quasi-periodic solutions via double Hopf bifurcation analysis and centre manifold reduction. Moreover, we uncover further details on the global dynamic behaviour by numerical continuation, including the occurrence of limit cycles in phase quadrature and 1-1 locking of quasi-periodic solutions., Comment: Accepted to the SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems. 28 pages, 8 figures

In this paper, we propose a framework for the longitudinal control of connected and automated vehicles traveling in mixed traffic consisting of connected and non-connected human-driven vehicles. Reactive and predictive controllers are proposed. Reactive controllers are given by explicit feedback control laws. In predictive controllers, the control input is optimized in a receding-horizon fashion, which depends on the predictions of motions of preceding vehicles. Beyond-line-of-sight information is obtained via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, and is utilized in the proposed reactive and predictive controllers. Simulations utilizing real traffic data are used to show that connectivity can bring significant energy savings., Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures, submitted to Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies

This work provides formal safety guarantees for control systems with disturbance. A disturbance observer-based robust safety-critical controller is proposed, that estimates the effect of the disturbance on safety and utilizes this estimate with control barrier functions to attain provably safe dynamic behavior. The observer error bound - which consists of transient and steady-state parts - is quantified, and the system is endowed with robustness against this error via the proposed controller. An adaptive cruise control problem is used as illustrative example through simulations including real disturbance data., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

This work presents a theoretical framework for the safety-critical control of time delay systems. The theory of control barrier functions, that provides formal safety guarantees for delay-free systems, is extended to systems with state delay. The notion of control barrier functionals is introduced to attain formal safety guarantees, by enforcing the forward invariance of safe sets defined in the infinite dimensional state space. The proposed framework is able to handle multiple delays and distributed delays both in the dynamics and in the safety condition, and provides an affine constraint on the control input that yields provable safety. This constraint can be incorporated into optimization problems to synthesize pointwise optimal and provable safe controllers. The applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated by numerical simulation examples., Comment: Submitted to the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control (JRNC). 25 pages, 3 figures

Safe longitudinal control is discussed for a connected automated truck traveling behind a preceding connected vehicle. A controller is proposed based on control barrier function theory and predictor feedback for provably safe, collision-free behavior by taking into account the significant response time of the truck as input delay and the uncertainty of its dynamical model as input disturbance. The benefits of the proposed controller compared to control designs that neglect the delay or treat the delay as disturbance are shown by numerical simulations., Comment: Accepted to the 17th IFAC Workshop on Time Delay Systems. 6 pages, 3 figures

Recent advances allow for the automation of food preparation in high-throughput environments, yet the successful deployment of these robots requires the planning and execution of quick, robust, and ultimately collision-free behaviors. In this work, we showcase a novel framework for modifying previously generated trajectories of robotic manipulators in highly detailed and dynamic collision environments using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). This method dynamically re-plans previously validated behaviors in the presence of changing environments -- and does so in a computationally efficient manner. Moreover, the approach provides rigorous safety guarantees of the resulting trajectories, factoring in the true underlying dynamics of the manipulator. This methodology is extensively validated on a full-scale robotic manipulator in a real-world cooking environment, and has resulted in substantial improvements in computation time and robustness over re-planning., Comment: Submitted to RAL/IROS

This work gives introduction to traffic control by connected automated vehicles. The influence of vehicle control on vehicular traffic and traffic control strategies are discussed and compared. It is highlighted that vehicle-to-everything connectivity allows connected automated vehicles to access the state of the traffic behind them such that feedback can be utilized to mitigate evolving congestions. Numerical simulations demonstrate that such connectivity-based traffic control is beneficial for smoothness and energy efficiency of highway traffic. The dynamics and stability of traffic flow, under the proposed controllers, are analyzed in detail to construct stability charts that guide the selection of stabilizing control gains., Comment: Accepted for publication in the book "AI-enabled Technologies for Autonomous and Connected Vehicles". 37 pages, 8 figures

Complex control systems are often described in a layered fashion, represented as higher-order systems where the inputs appear after a chain of integrators. While Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have proven to be powerful tools for safety-critical controller design of nonlinear systems, their application to higher-order systems adds complexity to the controller synthesis process -- it necessitates dynamically extending the CBF to include higher order terms, which consequently modifies the safe set in complex ways. We propose an alternative approach for addressing safety of higher-order systems through Control Barrier Function Backstepping. Drawing inspiration from the method of Lyapunov backstepping, we provide a constructive framework for synthesizing safety-critical controllers and CBFs for higher-order systems from a top-level dynamics safety specification and controller design. Furthermore, we integrate the proposed method with Lyapunov backstepping, allowing the tasks of stability and safety to be expressed individually but achieved jointly. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach in simulation., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Conference on Decision & Control (CDC) 2022

With the increasing prevalence of complex vision-based sensing methods for use in obstacle identification and state estimation, characterizing environment-dependent measurement errors has become a difficult and essential part of modern robotics. This paper presents a self-supervised learning approach to safety-critical control. In particular, the uncertainty associated with stereo vision is estimated, and adapted online to new visual environments, wherein this estimate is leveraged in a safety-critical controller in a robust fashion. To this end, we propose an algorithm that exploits the structure of stereo-vision to learn an uncertainty estimate without the need for ground-truth data. We then robustify existing Control Barrier Function-based controllers to provide safety in the presence of this uncertainty estimate. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on a quadrupedal robot in a variety of environments. When not using our method safety is violated. With offline training alone we observe the robot is safe, but overly-conservative. With our online method the quadruped remains safe and conservatism is reduced., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, conference publication at ICRA 2022

Bringing dynamic robots into the wild requires a tenuous balance between performance and safety. Yet controllers designed to provide robust safety guarantees often result in conservative behavior, and tuning these controllers to find the ideal trade-off between performance and safety typically requires domain expertise or a carefully constructed reward function. This work presents a design paradigm for systematically achieving behaviors that balance performance and robust safety by integrating safety-aware Preference-Based Learning (PBL) with Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Fusing these concepts -- safety-aware learning and safety-critical control -- gives a robust means to achieve safe behaviors on complex robotic systems in practice. We demonstrate the capability of this design paradigm to achieve safe and performant perception-based autonomous operation of a quadrupedal robot both in simulation and experimentally on hardware., Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures

Endowing nonlinear systems with safe behavior is increasingly important in modern control. This task is particularly challenging for real-life control systems that must operate safely in dynamically changing environments. This paper develops a framework for safety-critical control in dynamic environments, by establishing the notion of environmental control barrier functions (ECBFs). The framework is able to guarantee safety even in the presence of input delay, by accounting for the evolution of the environment during the delayed response of the system. The underlying control synthesis relies on predicting the future state of the system and the environment over the delay interval, with robust safety guarantees against prediction errors. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated by a simple adaptive cruise control problem and a more complex robotics application on a Segway platform., Comment: Accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology (TCST). 14 pages, 7 figures

It is known that the deconfining transition of QCD is accompanied by the appearance of localized eigenmodes at the low end of the Dirac spectrum. In the quenched case localization appears exactly at the critical temperature of deconfinement. In the present work, using quenched simulations exactly at the critical temperature, we show that the localization properties of low Dirac modes change abruptly between the confined and deconfined phase. This means that in the real Polyakov loop sector, the mobility edge has a discontinuity at the critical temperature. In contrast, in the complex sector, there is no such discontinuity at $T_c$, even the lowest Dirac modes remain delocalized at the critical temperature in the deconfined phase., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, (a few annoying typos corrected), proceeding of The 38th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, LATTICE2021, 26th-30th July, 2021, Zoom/Gather@Massachusetts Institute of Technology

We investigate the role of inhomogeneous field configurations in systems with a spontaneously broken continuous global symmetry. Spontaneous breaking is usually defined as a specific double limit, first infinite volume at finite explicit breaking sources, which are then extrapolated to zero. We consider a different approach in which the order parameter is constrained under the path integral, which we simulate using lattice Monte Carlo techniques. In this way we access the flat region of the effective potential and we show that inhomogeneous configurations are dominant there. We topologically classify the important configurations and measure the excess energy stored in the inhomogeneities allowing for the definition of a generalized differential surface tension. We show that this contribution becomes negligible at large volumes restoring the flatness of the effective potential in the thermodynamic limit., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, talk presented at The 38th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, LATTICE2021 26th-30th July, 2021, Zoom/Gather@Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This paper presents a framework for the safety-critical control of robotic systems, when safety is defined on safe regions in the configuration space. To maintain safety, we synthesize a safe velocity based on control barrier function theory without relying on a -- potentially complicated -- high-fidelity dynamical model of the robot. Then, we track the safe velocity with a tracking controller. This culminates in model-free safety critical control. We prove theoretical safety guarantees for the proposed method. Finally, we demonstrate that this approach is application-agnostic. We execute an obstacle avoidance task with a Segway in high-fidelity simulation, as well as with a Drone and a Quadruped in hardware experiments., Comment: Accepted to the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and submitted to the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 8 pages, 5 figures

Functional autonomous systems often realize complex tasks by utilizing state machines comprised of discrete primitive behaviors and transitions between these behaviors. This architecture has been widely studied in the context of quasi-static and dynamics-independent systems. However, applications of this concept to dynamical systems are relatively sparse, despite extensive research on individual dynamic primitive behaviors, which we refer to as "motion primitives." This paper formalizes a process to determine dynamic-state aware conditions for transitions between motion primitives in the context of safety. The result is framed as a "motion primitive graph" that can be traversed by standard graph search and planning algorithms to realize functional autonomy. To demonstrate this framework, dynamic motion primitives -- including standing up, walking, and jumping -- and the transitions between these behaviors are experimentally realized on a quadrupedal robot.

It is by now well established that Dirac fermions coupled to non-Abelian gauge theories can undergo an Anderson-type localization transition. This transition affects eigenmodes in the lowest part of the Dirac spectrum, the ones most relevant to the low-energy physics of these models. Here we review several aspects of this phenomenon, mostly using the tools of lattice gauge theory. In particular, we discuss how the transition is related to the finite-temperature transitions leading to the deconfinement of fermions, as well as to the restoration of chiral symmetry that is spontaneously broken at low temperature. Other topics we touch upon are the universality of the transition, and its connection to topological excitations (instantons) of the gauge field and the associated fermionic zero modes. While the main focus is on Quantum Chromodynamics, we also discuss how the localization transition appears in other related models with different fermionic contents (including the quenched approximation), gauge groups, and in different space-time dimensions. Finally, we offer some speculations about the physical relevance of the localization transition in these models., Comment: Invited review for the special issue of Universe "Modern Approaches to Non-Perturbative QCD and other Confining Gauge Theories", ed. D. Antonov. Revised version, 47 pages, 17 figures

The increasing complexity of modern robotic systems and the environments they operate in necessitates the formal consideration of safety in the presence of imperfect measurements. In this paper we propose a rigorous framework for safety-critical control of systems with erroneous state estimates. We develop this framework by leveraging Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and unifying the method of Backup Sets for synthesizing control invariant sets with robustness requirements -- the end result is the synthesis of Measurement-Robust Control Barrier Functions (MR-CBFs). This provides theoretical guarantees on safe behavior in the presence of imperfect measurements and improved robustness over standard CBF approaches. We demonstrate the efficacy of this framework both in simulation and experimentally on a Segway platform using an onboard stereo-vision camera for state estimation., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

We take the first step in using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to provide real-time on-board traffic predictions. In order to best utilize real-world V2V communication data, we integrate first principle models with deep learning. Specifically, we train recurrent neural networks to improve the predictions given by first principle models. Our approach is able to predict the velocity of individual vehicles up to a minute into the future with improved accuracy over first principle-based baselines. We conduct a comprehensive study to evaluate different methods of integrating first principle models with deep learning techniques. The source code for our models is available at https://github.com/Rose-STL-Lab/V2V-traffic-forecast ., Comment: 13 pages, 3rd Annual Conference on Learning for Dynamics and Control 2021

We show that the nature of the topological fluctuations in $SU(3)$ gauge theory changes drastically at the finite temperature phase transition. Starting from temperatures right above the phase transition topological fluctuations come in well separated lumps of unit charge that form a non-interacting ideal gas. Our analysis is based on a novel method to count not only the net topological charge, but also separately the number of positively and negatively charged lumps in lattice configurations using the spectrum of the overlap Dirac operator. This enables us to determine the joint distribution of the number of positively and negatively charged topological objects, and we find this distribution to be consistent with that of an ideal gas of unit charged topological objects., Comment: 7 pages, 6 eps figures (expanded journal version, new figure, discussion and references added)

We introduce a methodology to guarantee safety against the spread of infectious diseases by viewing epidemiological models as control systems and by considering human interventions (such as quarantining or social distancing) as control input. We consider a generalized compartmental model that represents the form of the most popular epidemiological models and we design safety-critical controllers that formally guarantee safe evolution with respect to keeping certain populations of interest under prescribed safe limits. Furthermore, we discuss how measurement delays originated from incubation period and testing delays affect safety and how delays can be compensated via predictor feedback. We demonstrate our results by synthesizing active intervention policies that bound the number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths for epidemiological models capturing the spread of COVID-19 in the USA., Comment: Accepted to the IEEE Control System Letters (L-CSS) and the 2021 American Control Conference (ACC). 6 pages, 3 figures

We study the finite temperature localization transition in the spectrum of the overlap Dirac operator. Simulating the quenched approximation of QCD, we calculate the mobility edge, separating localized and delocalized modes in the spectrum. We do this at several temperatures just above the deconfining transition and by extrapolation we determine the temperature where the mobility edge vanishes and localized modes completely disappear from the spectrum. We find that this temperature, where even the lowest Dirac eigenmodes become delocalized, coincides with the critical temperature of the deconfining transition. This result, together with our previously obtained similar findings for staggered fermions shows that quark localization at the deconfining temperature is independent of the fermion discretization, suggesting that deconfinement and localization of the lowest Dirac eigenmodes are closely related phenomena., Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, revised (new figures, references and some discussions added), published final version

Across the finite temperature transition to the quark-gluon plasma, the QCD topological susceptibility decreases sharply. Thus in the high temperature phase the remaining topological objects (possibly calorons) form a weakly interacting dilute gas. The overlap Dirac operator, through its exact zero modes, allows one to measure the net topological charge. We show that separately the number of positively and negatively charged topological objects can also be extracted from the low end of the overlap Dirac spectrum. We find that slightly above the phase transition their number distributions are already consistent with an ideal gas of non-interacting topological objects., Comment: 7 pages, to be published in Proceedings of the 37th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2019), Wuhan, China

We investigate the QCD phase diagram for nonzero background magnetic fields using first-principles lattice simulations. At the physical point (in terms of quark masses), the thermodynamics of this system is controlled by two opposing effects: magnetic catalysis (enhancement of the quark condensate) at low temperature and inverse magnetic catalysis (reduction of the condensate) in the transition region. While the former is known to be robust and independent of the details of the interactions, inverse catalysis arises as a result of a delicate competition, effective only for light quarks. By performing simulations at different quark masses, we determine the pion mass above which inverse catalysis does not take place in the transition region anymore. Even for pions heavier than this limiting value - where the quark condensate undergoes magnetic catalysis - our results are consistent with the notion that the transition temperature is reduced by the magnetic field. These findings will be useful to guide low-energy models and effective theories of QCD., Comment: Revised version; matches published version; 14 pages, 7 figures

At high temperature part of the spectrum of the quark Dirac operator is known to consist of localized states. This comes about because around the crossover temperature to the quark-gluon plasma localized states start to appear at the low end of the spectrum and as the system is further heated, states higher up in the spectrum also get localized. Since localization and the crossover to the chirally restored phase happen around the same temperature, the question of how the two phenomena are connected naturally arises. Here we speculate on the nature of possible gauge configurations that could support localized quark eigenmodes. In particular, by analyzing eigenmodes of the staggerd and overlap Dirac operator we show that the dilute gas of calorons in the high temperature phase is very unlikely to play a major role in localization., Comment: 7 pages, to be published in Proceedings of the 36th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice2018), July 22-28, 2018, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

In this paper we study the localization transition of Dirac eigenmodes in quenched QCD. We determined the temperature dependence of the mobility edge in the quark-gluon plasma phase near the deconfining critical temperature. We calculated the critical temperature where all of the localized modes disappear from the spectrum and compared it with the critical temperature of the deconfining transition. We found that the localization transition happens at the same temperature as the deconfining transition which indicates a strong relation between the two phenomena., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, to be published in Proceedings of the 36th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice2018), July 22-28, 2018, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

We will discuss the issue of Landau levels of quarks in lattice QCD in an external magnetic field. We will show that in the two-dimensional case the lowest Landau level can be identified unambiguously even if the strong interactions are turned on. Starting from this observation, we will then show how one can define a "lowest Landau level" in the four-dimensional case, and discuss how much of the observed effects of a magnetic field can be explained in terms of it. Our results can be used to test the validity of low-energy models of QCD that make use of the lowest-Landau-level approximation., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures; to appear in the proceedings of the 35th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2017), June 19-24, 2017, Granada, Spain