Recently, auto-bidding technique has become an essential tool to increase the revenue of advertisers.

Recently, the outstanding performance reached by neural networks in many tasks has led to their deployment in autonomous systems, such as robots and vehicles. However, neural networks are not yet trustworthy, being prone to different types of misbehavior, such as anomalous samples, distribution shifts, adversarial attacks, and other threats. Furthermore, frameworks for accelerating the inference of neural networks typically run on rich operating systems that are less predictable in terms of timing behavior and present larger surfaces for cyber-attacks. To address these issues, this paper presents a software architecture for enhancing safety, security, and predictability levels of learning-based autonomous systems. It leverages two isolated execution domains, one dedicated to the execution of neural networks under a rich operating system, which is deemed not trustworthy, and one responsible for running safety-critical functions, possibly under a different operating system capable of handling real-time constraints. Both domains are hosted on the same computing platform and isolated through a type-1 real-time hypervisor enabling fast and predictable inter-domain communication to exchange real-time data. The two domains cooperate to provide a fail-safe mechanism based on a safety monitor, which oversees the state of the system and switches to a simpler but safer backup module, hosted in the safety-critical domain, whenever its behavior is considered untrustworthy. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is illustrated by a set of experiments performed on two control systems: a Furuta pendulum and a rover. The results confirm the utility of the fall-back mechanism in preventing faults due to the learning component.

Autonomous microrobots in blood vessels could enable minimally invasive therapies, but navigation is challenged by dense, moving obstacles. We propose a real-time path planning framework that couples an analytic geometry global planner (AGP) with two reactive local escape controllers, one based on rules and one based on reinforcement learning, to handle sudden moving obstacles. Using real-time imaging, the system estimates the positions of the microrobot, obstacles, and targets and computes collision-free motions. In simulation, AGP yields shorter paths and faster planning than weighted A* (WA*), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and rapidly exploring random trees (RRT), while maintaining feasibility and determinism. We extend AGP from 2D to 3D without loss of speed. In both simulations and experiments, the combined global planner and local controllers reliably avoid moving obstacles and reach targets. The average planning time is 40 ms per frame, compatible with 25 fps image acquisition and real-time closed-loop control. These results advance autonomous microrobot navigation and targeted drug delivery in vascular environments.

--This paper presents a unified framework for the evaluation and optimization of autonomous vehicle trajectories, integrating formal safety, comfort, and efficiency criteria. An innovative geometric indicator, based on the analysis of safety zones using adaptive ellipses, is used to accurately quantify collision risks. Our method applies the Shoelace formula to compute the intersection area in the case of misaligned and time-varying configurations. Comfort is modeled using indicators centered on longitudinal and lateral jerk, while efficiency is assessed by overall travel time. These criteria are aggregated into a comprehensive objective function solved using a PSO-based algorithm. The approach was successfully validated under real traffic conditions via experiments conducted in an urban intersection involving an autonomous vehicle interacting with a human-operated vehicle, and in simulation using data recorded from human driving in real traffic. Current research on autonomous vehicles and intelligent transport systems underlines the necessity for advanced decision-making frameworks that effectively manage multiple objectives. Among these objectives, safety retains the highest priority, requiring the vehicles to not only avoid collisions, but also to comply with traffic rules as well as exhibit a predictable behavior in complex urban environments. While safety is paramount, it is also essential to maintain the system's efficiency by optimizing traffic flows, minimizing delays, and reducing congestion, especially as transport infrastructures become increasingly interconnected. In light of the above, it is clear that balancing safety, efficiency, and comfort is not just a conceptual ideal but rather a requirement that shapes autonomous vehicle decision-making frameworks.

Despite impressive advancements of industrial collaborative robots, their potential remains largely untapped due to the difficulty in balancing human safety and comfort with fast production constraints. To help address this challenge, we present PRO-MIND, a novel human-in-the-loop framework that leverages valuable data about the human co-worker to optimise robot trajectories. By estimating human attention and mental effort, our method dynamically adjusts safety zones and enables on-the-fly alterations of the robot path to enhance human comfort and optimal stopping conditions. Moreover, we formulate a multi-objective optimisation to adapt the robot's trajectory execution time and smoothness based on the current human psycho-physical stress, estimated from heart rate variability and frantic movements. These adaptations exploit the properties of B-spline curves to preserve continuity and smoothness, which are crucial factors in improving motion predictability and comfort. Evaluation in two realistic case studies showcases the framework's ability to restrain the operators' workload and stress and to ensure their safety while enhancing human-robot productivity. Further strengths of PRO-MIND include its adaptability to each individual's specific needs and sensitivity to variations in attention, mental effort, and stress during task execution.

We present a simple yet effective approach that can transform the OpenAI GPT-3.5 model into a reliable motion planner for autonomous vehicles. Motion planning is a core challenge in autonomous driving, aiming to plan a driving trajectory that is safe and comfortable. Existing motion planners predominantly leverage heuristic methods to forecast driving trajectories, yet these approaches demonstrate insufficient generalization capabilities in the face of novel and unseen driving scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to motion planning that capitalizes on the strong reasoning capabilities and generalization potential inherent to Large Language Models (LLMs). The fundamental insight of our approach is the reformulation of motion planning as a language modeling problem, a perspective not previously explored. Specifically, we represent the planner inputs and outputs as language tokens, and leverage the LLM to generate driving trajectories through a language description of coordinate positions. With this strategy, the LLM can describe highly precise trajectory coordinates and also its internal decision-making process in natural language. We evaluate our approach on the large-scale nuScenes dataset, and extensive experiments substantiate the effectiveness, generalization ability, and interpretability of our GPT-based motion planner. Code is now available here.

A critical task for developing safe autonomous driving stacks is to determine whether an obstacle is safety-critical, i.e., poses an imminent threat to the autonomous vehicle. Our previous work showed that Hamilton Jacobi reachability theory can be applied to compute interaction-dynamics-aware perception safety zones that better inform an ego vehicle's perception module which obstacles are considered safety-critical. For completeness, these zones are typically larger than absolutely necessary, forcing the perception module to pay attention to a larger collection of objects for the sake of conservatism. As an improvement, we propose a maneuver-based decomposition of our safety zones that leverages information about the ego maneuver to reduce the zone volume. In particular, we propose a "temporal convolution" operation that produces safety zones for specific ego maneuvers, thus limiting the ego's behavior to reduce the size of the safety zones. We show with numerical experiments that maneuver-based zones are significantly smaller (up to 76% size reduction) than the baseline while maintaining completeness.

In this paper, we solve the complete coordination problem of robotic fiber positioners using supervisory control theory. In particular, we model positioners and their behavioral specifications as discrete-event systems by the discretization of their motion spaces. We synthesize a coordination supervisor associated with a specific set of positioners. In particular, the coordination supervisor includes the solutions to the complete coordination problem of its corresponding positioners. Then, we use the backtracking forcibility technique of supervisory control theory to present an algorithm based on a completeness condition to solve the coordination problem similar to a reconfiguration problem. We illustrate the functionality of our method using an example.

Human safety has always been the main priority when working near an industrial robot. With the rise of Human-Robot Collaborative environments, physical barriers to avoiding collisions have been disappearing, increasing the risk of accidents and the need for solutions that ensure a safe Human-Robot Collaboration. This paper proposes a safety system that implements Speed and Separation Monitoring (SSM) type of operation. For this, safety zones are defined in the robot's workspace following current standards for industrial collaborative robots. A deep learning-based computer vision system detects, tracks, and estimates the 3D position of operators close to the robot. The robot control system receives the operator's 3D position and generates 3D representations of them in a simulation environment. Depending on the zone where the closest operator was detected, the robot stops or changes its operating speed. Three different operation modes in which the human and robot interact are presented. Results show that the vision-based system can correctly detect and classify in which safety zone an operator is located and that the different proposed operation modes ensure that the robot's reaction and stop time are within the required time limits to guarantee safety.

With the increasing size of today's data sets, finding the right parameter configuration in model selection via cross-validation can be an extremely time-consuming task. In this paper we propose an improved cross-validation procedure which uses nonparametric testing coupled with sequential analysis to determine the best parameter set on linearly increasing subsets of the data. By eliminating underperforming candidates quickly and keeping promising candidates as long as possible, the method speeds up the computation while preserving the capability of the full cross-validation. Theoretical considerations underline the statistical power of our procedure. The experimental evaluation shows that our method reduces the computation time by a factor of up to 120 compared to a full cross-validation with a negligible impact on the accuracy.