Parallel Differentiable Reachability for Learning and Planning with Certified Neural Dynamics and Controllers


Keyi Shen, Glen Chou

Paper ID 191

Session Planning

Posters presented in the poster session following their oral. Locations not assigned.

Abstract: Neural network (NN) dynamics models and control policies achieve strong performance in robotics, but providing sound guarantees under uncertainty is difficult, especially when the NNs are components within the closed-loop system. Existing reachability tools offer formal over-approximations, yet are often non-differentiable, overly conservative, and too slow to integrate into modern learning and real-time planning pipelines. To address this, we present a parallelizable, differentiable reachability analysis tool in JAX that unifies continuous- and discrete-time systems and supports both analytical and NN-based dynamics and controllers. Our reachability tool uses Taylor-model flowpipe construction and CROWN-style linear bound relaxation and propagation, yielding a GPU-batched reachability primitive that can be differentiated and used in downstream objectives. Building on this primitive, we design (i) a certified training method that encourages the learning of reachability-friendly dynamics models and controllers, and (ii) a reachability-informed sampling-based MPC scheme that incorporates certified reachable sets during action selection and enables gradient-based refinement. Experiments on non-prehensile object manipulation and quadrotor control tasks show competitive performance to baseline planners while providing tight, certified reachability guarantees under uncertainty.