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The panel was held on 14 November 2023 at Purdue University as part of a Grand Challenges in Resilience Workshop sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and organized by our center, the Center for Resilient Infrastructures, Systems, and Processes (CRISP). 

In a Stackelberg game, a leader commits to a randomized strategy and a follower chooses their best strategy in response. We consider an extension of a standard Stackelberg game, called a discrete-time dynamic Stackelberg game, that has an underlying state space that affects the leader’s rewards and available strategies and evolves in a Markovian manner depending on both the leader and follower’s selected trategies. Although standard Stackelberg games have been utilized to improve scheduling in security domains, their deployment is often limited by requiring complete information of the follower’s utility function. In contrast, we consider scenarios where the follower’s utility function is unknown to the leader; however, it can be linearly parameterized. Our objective is then to provide an algorithm that prescribes a randomized strategy to the leader at each step of the game based on observations of how the follower responded in previous steps. We design an online learning algorithm that, with high probability, is no-regret, i.e., achieves a regret bound (when compared to the best policy in hindsight), which is sublinear in the number of time steps; the degree of sublinearity depends on the number of features representing the follower’s utility function. The regret of the proposed learning algorithm is independent of the size of the state space and polynomial in the rest of the parameters of the game. We show that the proposed learning algorithm outperforms existing model-free reinforcement learning approaches. 

Shared autonomy provides a framework where a human and an automated system, such as a robot, jointly control the system’s behavior, enabling an effective solution for various applications, including human-robot interaction and remote operation of a semi-autonomous system. However, a challenging problem in shared autonomy is safety because the human input may be unknown and unpredictable, which affects the robot’s safety constraints. If the human input is a force applied through physical contact with the robot, it also alters the robot’s behavior to maintain safety. We address the safety issue of shared autonomy in real-time applications by proposing a two-layer control framework. In the first layer, we use the history of human input measurements to infer what the human wants the robot to do and define the robot’s safety constraints according to that inference. In the second layer, we formulate a rapidly-exploring random tree of barrier pairs, with each barrier pair composed of a barrier function and a controller. Using the controllers in these barrier pairs, the robot is able to maintain its safe operation under the intervention from the human input. This proposed control framework allows the robot to assist the human while preventing them from encountering safety issues. We demonstrate the proposed control framework on a simulation of a two-linkage manipulator robot. 

In planning problems, it is often challenging to fully model the desired specifications. In particular, in human-robot interaction, such difficulty may arise due to human's preferences that are either private or complex to model. Consequently, the resulting objective function can only partially capture the specifications and optimizing that may lead to poor performance with respect to the true specifications. Motivated by this challenge, we formulate a problem, called diverse stochastic planning, that aims to generate a set of representative---small and diverse---behaviors that are near-optimal with respect to the known objective. In particular, the problem aims to compute a set of diverse and near-optimal policies for systems modeled by a Markov decision process. We cast the problem as a constrained nonlinear optimization for which we propose a solution relying on the Frank-Wolfe method. We then prove that the proposed solution converges to a stationary point and demonstrate its efficacy in several planning problems.