collaborators

6 papers

cs.RO2026

Terrain Consistent Reference-Guided RL for Humanoid Navigation Autonomy

William D. Compton, Zachary Olkin, Aaron D. Ames

We present a method for training reference-guided, perceptive reinforcement learning locomotion policies for humanoid robots in which reference trajectories are modulated in traini…

eess.SY2026

Stability of Control Lyapunov Function Guided Reinforcement Learning

Zachary Olkin, William D. Compton, Aaron D. Ames

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the de facto method for achieving locomotion on humanoid robots in practice, yet stability analysis of the corresponding control policies is…

cs.RO2026

Chasing Autonomy: Dynamic Retargeting and Control Guided RL for Performant and Controllable Humanoid Running

Zachary Olkin, William D. Compton, Ryan M. Bena +1

Humanoid robots have the promise of locomoting like humans, including fast and dynamic running. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) controllers that can mimic human motions have…

cs.RO2025

CLF-RL: Control Lyapunov Function Guided Reinforcement Learning

Kejun Li, Zachary Olkin, Yisong Yue +1

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in generating robust locomotion policies for bipedal robots, but often suffers from tedious reward design and sensitivity to poorly sh…

eess.SY2025

Compatibility of Multiple Control Barrier Functions for Constrained Nonlinear Systems

Max H. Cohen, Eugene Lavretsky, Aaron D. Ames

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a powerful tool for the constrained control of nonlinear systems; however, the majority of results in the literature focus on systems subject t…

eess.SY2025

Layered Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for Robust Stabilization of Hybrid Systems

Zachary Olkin, Aaron D. Ames

Computing the receding horizon optimal control of nonlinear hybrid systems is typically prohibitively slow, limiting real-time implementation. To address this challenge, we propose…