Related papers: Fractals2019: Combinatorial Optimisation with Dyna…
Recently it was shown that self-organized criticality is an important ingredient of the dynamics of cumulus clouds (Physical Review E, 103(5), p.052106, 2021). Here we introduce a new algorithm to simulate cumulus clouds in two-dimensional…
We develop a dynamical systems approach to prioritizing and selecting multiple recurring tasks with the aim of conferring a degree of deliberative goal selection to a mobile robot confronted with competing objectives. We take navigation as…
Motion planning and control are crucial components of robotics applications like automated driving. Here, spatio-temporal hard constraints like system dynamics and safety boundaries (e.g., obstacles) restrict the robot's motions. Direct…
This paper presents a novel method for reformulating non-differentiable collision avoidance constraints into smooth nonlinear constraints using strong duality of convex optimization. We focus on a controlled object whose goal is to avoid…
In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based algorithm for trajectory optimization for constrained dynamical systems. This problem is motivated by the fact that for most robotic systems, the dynamics may not always be known.…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…
Preference optimization is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, many margin-based methods also suppress the chosen response when they try to suppress the rejected one, and there is no general…
In this paper, we present the Monte-Carlo Compressive Optimization algorithm, a new method to solve a combinatorial optimization problem that is assumed compressible. The method relies on random queries to the objective function in order to…
We expose in a tutorial fashion the mechanisms which underlie the synthesis of optimization algorithms based on dynamic integral quadratic constraints. We reveal how these tools from robust control allow to design accelerated gradient…
The aim of this manuscript is to approach by means of first order differential equations/inclusions convex programming problems with two-block separable linear constraints and objectives, whereby (at least) one of the components of the…
Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…
Preliminary spacecraft trajectory optimization is a parameter dependent global search problem that aims to provide a set of solutions that are of high quality and diverse. In the case of numerical solution, it is dependent on the original…
We propose a novel direct transcription and solution method for solving nonlinear, continuous-time dynamic optimization problems. Instead of forcing the dynamic constraints to be satisfied only at a selected number of points as in direct…
As one of the most robust global optimization methods, simulated annealing has received considerable attention, with many variations that attempt to improve the cooling schedule. This paper introduces a variant of simulated annealing that…
With the goal to provide absolute lower bounds for the best possible running times that can be achieved by $(1+\lambda)$-type search heuristics on common benchmark problems, we recently suggested a dynamic programming approach that computes…
This paper presents a framework to tackle constrained combinatorial optimization problems using deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, we extend the Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) theory in order to deal with constraints in…
This paper presents a novel Differential Evolution algorithm for protein folding optimization that is applied to a three-dimensional AB off-lattice model. The proposed algorithm includes two new mechanisms. A local search is used to improve…
Distributionally robust optimal control (DROC) is gaining interest. This study presents a reformulation method for discrete DROC (DDROC) problems to design optimal control policies under a worst-case distributional uncertainty. The…
Direct collocation methods are powerful tools to solve trajectory optimization problems in robotics. While their resulting trajectories tend to be dynamically accurate, they may also present large kinematic errors in the case of constrained…
We introduce a novel method for handling endpoint constraints in constrained differential dynamic programming (DDP). Unlike existing approaches, our method guarantees quadratic convergence and is exact, effectively managing rank…