Spring 2025 GRASP SFI: Haimin Hu, Princeton University, “From Gambits to Assurances: Game-Theoretic Integration of Safety and Learning for Human-Centered Robotics”
April 23 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom.
ABSTRACT
From autonomous vehicles navigating busy intersections to quadrupeds deployed in household environments, robots must operate safely and efficiently around people in uncertain and unstructured situations. However, today’s robots still struggle to robustly handle low-probability events without becoming overly conservative. In this talk, I will discuss how planning in the joint space of physical and information states (e.g., beliefs) enables robots to make safe, adaptive decisions in human-centered scenarios. I will begin by introducing a unified safety filter framework that combines robust safety analysis with probabilistic reasoning to enable trustworthy human–robot interaction. I will discuss how robots can reduce conservativeness without compromising safety by closing the interaction–learning loop. Next, I will show how game-theoretic reinforcement learning tractably synthesizes a safety filter for high-dimensional systems, guarantees training convergence, and reduces the policy’s exploitability. Finally, I will present an algorithmic approach to scaling up game-theoretic planning for resolving conflicts and optimizing social welfare for strategic interactions involving many agents. I will conclude with a vision for next-generation human-centered robotic systems that actively align with their human peers and enjoy verifiable safety assurances.
Presenter
Haimin Hu
Haimin Hu is a final-year Ph.D. candidate in ECE at Princeton University. His research integrates dynamic game theory with control systems safety and reinforcement learning to enable trustworthy human–robot interaction. Prior to his doctoral studies, he received his M.S.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 and a B.E. degree in Electronic and Information Engineering from ShanghaiTech University in 2018. From 2017 to 2018, he was a visiting student in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. He has worked at the Toyota Research Institute, the Honda Research Institute, and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Padova, Italy, and he currently serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. In 2024, he was named a Human–Robot Interaction Pioneer by IEEE and ACM.