2025

1. [C90] Safe Control of Quadruped in Varying Dynamics via Safety Index Adaptation
   Kai S. Yun, Rui Chen, Chase Dunaway, John M. Dolan and Changliu Liu
   IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2025
   

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   Varying dynamics pose a fundamental difficulty when deploying safe control laws in the real world. Safety Index Synthesis (SIS) deeply relies on the system dynamics and once the dynamics change, the previously synthesized safety index becomes invalid. In this work, we show the real-time efficacy of Safety Index Adaptation (SIA) in varying dynamics. SIA enables real-time adaptation to the changing dynamics so that the adapted safe control law can still guarantee 1) forward invariance within a safe region and 2) finite time convergence to that safe region. This work employs SIA on a package-carrying quadruped robot, where the payload weight changes in real-time. SIA updates the safety index when the dynamics change, e.g., a change in payload weight, so that the quadruped can avoid obstacles while achieving its performance objectives. Numerical study provides theoretical guarantees for SIA and a series of hardware experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SIA in real-world deployment in avoiding obstacles under varying dynamics.

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2. [C101] SPARK: Safe Protective and Assistive Robot Kit
   Yifan Sun, Rui Chen, Kai S Yun, Yikuan Fang, Sebin Jung, Feihan Li, Bowei Li, Weiye Zhao and Changliu Liu
   IFAC Symposium on Robotics, 2025
   

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   This paper introduces the Safe Protective and Assistive Robot Kit (SPARK), a comprehensive benchmark designed to ensure safety in humanoid autonomy and teleoperation. Humanoid robots pose significant safety risks due to their physical capabilities of interacting with complex environments. The physical structures of humanoid robots further add complexity to the design of general safety solutions. To facilitate the safe deployment of complex robot systems, SPARK can be used as a toolbox that comes with state-of-the-art safe control algorithms in a modular and composable robot control framework. Users can easily configure safety criteria and sensitivity levels to optimize the balance between safety and performance. To accelerate humanoid safety research and development, SPARK provides a simulation benchmark that compares safety approaches in a variety of environments, tasks, and robot models. Furthermore, SPARK allows quick deployment of synthesized safe controllers on real robots. For hardware deployment, SPARK supports Apple Vision Pro (AVP) or a Motion Capture System as external sensors, while also offering interfaces for seamless integration with alternative hardware setups. This paper demonstrates SPARK’s capability with both simulation experiments and case studies with a Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Leveraging these advantages of SPARK, users and researchers can significantly improve the safety of their humanoid systems as well as accelerate relevant research. The open-source code is available at (https://github.com/intelligent-control-lab/spark)

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3. [C100] Modelverification. jl: a comprehensive toolbox for formally verifying deep neural networks
   Tianhao Wei, Hanjiang Hu, Luca Marzari, Kai S Yun, Peizhi Niu, Xusheng Luo and Changliu Liu
   Conference on Computer Aided Verification, 2025
   

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   Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are crucial in approximating nonlinear functions across diverse applications, ranging from image classification to control. Verifying specific input-output properties can be a highly challenging task due to the lack of a single, self-contained framework that allows a complete range of verification types. To this end, we present \textttModelVerification.jl (MV), the first comprehensive, cutting-edge toolbox that contains a suite of state-of-the-art methods for verifying different types of DNNs and safety specifications. This versatile toolbox is designed to empower developers and machine learning practitioners with robust tools for verifying and ensuring the trustworthiness of their DNN models.