Related papers: Optimal control with learning on the fly: a toy pr…
This paper considers optimal control problems defined by a monotone dynamical system, a monotone cost, and monotone constraints. We identify families of such problems for which the optimal solution is bang-ride, i.e., always operates on the…
Optimal control problems with free terminal time present many challenges including nonsmooth and discontinuous control laws, irregular value functions, many local optima, and the curse of dimensionality. To overcome these issues, we propose…
Two non-intrusive uncertainty propagation approaches are proposed for the performance analysis of engineering systems described by expensive-to-evaluate deterministic computer models with parameters defined as interval variables. These…
Probabilistic control design is founded on the principle that a rational agent attempts to match modelled with an arbitrary desired closed-loop system trajectory density. The framework was originally proposed as a tractable alternative to…
The article poses a general model for optimal control subject to information constraints, motivated in part by recent work of Sims and others on information-constrained decision-making by economic agents. In the average-cost optimal control…
Stochastic Nonlinear Optimal Control (SNOC) involves minimizing a cost function that averages out the random uncertainties affecting the dynamics of nonlinear systems. For tractability reasons, this problem is typically addressed by…
We consider the problem of controlling an unknown linear dynamical system under adversarially changing convex costs and full feedback of both the state and cost function. We present the first computationally-efficient algorithm that attains…
We study a single risky financial asset model subject to price impact and transaction cost over an finite time horizon. An investor needs to execute a long position in the asset affecting the price of the asset and possibly incurring in…
Bayesian optimization usually assumes that a Bayesian prior is given. However, the strong theoretical guarantees in Bayesian optimization are often regrettably compromised in practice because of unknown parameters in the prior. In this…
We consider a Markovian stochastic control problem with model uncertainty. The controller (intelligent player) observes only the state, and, therefore, uses feed-back (closed-loop) strategies. The adverse player (nature) who does not have a…
Relying on the careful study of a related problem in the calculus of variations, we study a class of optimal control problems in which the control lies on the acceleration, with state constraints on the position variable. In dimension one,…
In this article, we discuss two algorithms tailored to discrete-time deterministic finite-horizon nonlinear optimal control problems or so-called deterministic trajectory optimization problems. Both algorithms can be derived from an…
Many safety-critical real-world problems, such as autonomous driving and collaborative robots, are of a distributed multi-agent nature. To optimize the performance of these systems while ensuring safety, we can cast them as distributed…
We consider a class of closed loop stochastic optimal control problems in finite time horizon, in which the cost is an expectation conditional on the event that the process has not exited a given bounded domain. An important difficulty is…
One way to make decisions under uncertainty is to select an optimal option from a possible range of options, by maximizing the expected utilities derived from a probability model. However, under severe uncertainty, identifying precise…
In nonstationary bandit learning problems, the decision-maker must continually gather information and adapt their action selection as the latent state of the environment evolves. In each time period, some latent optimal action maximizes…
Stochastic model predictive control has been a successful and robust control framework for many robotics tasks where the system dynamics model is slightly inaccurate or in the presence of environment disturbances. Despite the successes, it…
In this paper, optimal time control problems and optimal target control problems are studied for the approximately null-controllable heat equations. Compared with the existed results on these problems, the boundary of control variables are…
This paper presents a new technique to control highly redundant mechanical systems, such as humanoid robots. We take inspiration from two approaches. Prioritized control is a widespread multi-task technique in robotics and animation: tasks…
We study the control of an \emph{unknown} linear dynamical system under general convex costs. The objective is minimizing regret vs. the class of disturbance-feedback-controllers, which encompasses all stabilizing…