Risk-Aware Robotics: Tail Risk Measures in Planning, Control, and Verification [Focus on Education]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Often, control theorists and roboticists expect systems to function as reliably and predictably as the equations we use to represent them. Sadly, reality is often more random than our equations. For example, take a robot navigating in two similar but unstructured environments. Random perturbations in terrain and scenery could cause the robot to take wildly different paths. In another example, take a perfectly orchestrated robotic swarm that finds itself in dissonance moments later due to network connectivity going down and package loss. Such randomness arises because our equations are imperfect models of reality. So, perhaps we should find a way to account for such randomness in our equations themselves. This article delves into how tail risk measures—formal mathematical concepts of risk traditionally used in the financial community—facilitate accounting for this randomness in planning, control, and verification. The exposition to follow both defines these measures and includes multiple examples of their use in prescribing risk-aware control across all levels of the modern control stack. Finally, we end with a brief survey of existing and open problems in the field.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".