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Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a widely used nature-inspired meta-heuristic for solving continuous optimization problems. However, when running the PSO algorithm, one encounters the phenomenon of so-called stagnation, that means in…
We study the problem of pathwise stochastic optimal control, where the optimization is performed for each fixed realisation of the driving noise, by phrasing the problem in terms of the optimal control of rough differential equations. We…
We derive a framework to compute optimal controls for problems with states in the space of probability measures. Since many optimal control problems constrained by a system of ordinary differential equations (ODE) modelling interacting…
Microrobotics has the potential to revolutionize many applications including targeted material delivery, assembly, and surgery. The same properties that promise breakthrough solutions---small size and large populations---present unique…
Coordination of distributed agents is required for problems arising in many areas, including multi-robot systems, networking and e-commerce. As a formal framework for such problems, we use the decentralized partially observable Markov…
Robot swarms can be tasked with a variety of automated sensing and inspection applications in aerial, aquatic, and surface environments. In this paper, we study a simplified two-outcome surface inspection task. We task a group of robots to…
We investigate a numerical behaviour of robust deterministic optimal control problem subject to a convection diffusion equation containing uncertain inputs. Stochastic Galerkin approach, turning the original optimization problem containing…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm control has applications including target tracking, surveillance, terrain mapping, and precision agriculture. Decentralized control methods are particularly useful when the swarm is large, as centralized…
Collision avoidance is one of the most important topics in the robotics field. The goal is to move the robots from initial locations to target locations such that they follow shortest non-colliding paths in the shortest time and with the…
This paper addresses the fundamental problem of non-uniform area coverage in multi-agent systems, where different regions require varying levels of attention due to mission-dependent priorities. Existing uniform coverage strategies are…
Two major problems in modern cities are air contamination and road congestion. They are closely related and present a similar origin: traffic flow. To face these problems, local governments impose traffic restrictions to prevent the entry…
To tackle the difficulties faced by both stochastic dynamic programming and scenario tree methods, we present some variational approach for numerical solution of stochastic optimal control problems. We consider two different interpretations…
Optimal control of harvested population at the edge of extinction in an unprotected area, is considered. The underlying population dynamics is governed by a Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piskunov equation with a harvesting term and space-dependent…
Trajectory optimization is a fundamental problem in robotics. While optimization of continuous control trajectories is well developed, many applications require both discrete and continuous, i.e., hybrid, controls. Finding an optimal…
Swarm robotics utilises decentralised self-organising systems to form complex collective behaviours built from the bottom-up using individuals that have limited capabilities. Previous work has shown that simple occlusion-based strategies…
This paper deals with the gradient-based extremum seeking control (ESC) with actuation dynamics governed by distributed wave partial differential equations (PDEs). To achieve the control objective of real-time optimization for this class of…
We consider a unifying framework for stochastic control problem including the following features: partial observation, path-dependence (both with respect to the state and the control), and without any non-degeneracy condition on the…
This paper addresses the decentralized non-uniform area coverage problem for multi-agent systems, a critical task in missions with high spatial priority and resource constraints. While existing density-based methods often rely on…
In this paper, we address the problem of collision avoidance for a swarm of UAVs used for continuous surveillance of an urban environment. Our method, LSwarm, efficiently avoids collisions with static obstacles, dynamic obstacles and other…
We present a novel algorithm to control the physically-based animation of smoke. Given a set of keyframe smoke shapes, we compute a dense sequence of control force fields that can drive the smoke shape to match several keyframes at certain…