Safety Without Exploration: Teaching Robots Where Not to Die
Crash. That is the awkward unit of measurement in robot safety. Not average reward. Not expected constraint cost. Not a beautiful training curve with a polite little variance band. A warehouse robot either clips a worker’s ankle or it does not. A drone either respects the no-fly boundary or it becomes a lawsuit with propellers. A medical robot either stays inside its allowed operating envelope or someone gets to explain “statistically safe” to a hospital ethics board. ...