Related papers: Towards a Framework for Nonlinear Predictive Contr…
Model-based reinforcement learning is an effective approach for controlling an unknown system. It is based on a longstanding pipeline familiar to the control community in which one performs experiments on the environment to collect a…
The canonical solution methodology for finite constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the objective is to maximize the expected infinite-horizon discounted rewards subject to the expected infinite-horizon discounted costs…
Real-world autonomous systems operate under uncertainty about both their pose and dynamics. Autonomous control systems must simultaneously perform estimation and control tasks to maintain robustness to changing dynamics or modeling errors.…
This paper investigates the collision-free control problem for multi-agent systems. For such multi-agent systems, it is the typical situation where conventional methods using either the usual centralized model predictive control (MPC), or…
The coupled problems of selecting control nodes and designing control actions for nonlinear network dynamics are fundamental scientific problems with applications in many diverse fields. These problems are thoroughly studied for linear…
A tremendous range of design tasks in materials, physics, and biology can be formulated as finding the optimum of an objective function depending on many parameters without knowing its closed-form expression or the derivative. Traditional…
This paper proposes a way to combine the Mesh Adaptive Direct Search (MADS) algorithm with the Cross-Entropy (CE) method for non smooth constrained optimization. The CE method is used as a Search step by the MADS algorithm. The result of…
Planning problems are hard, motion planning, for example, isPSPACE-hard. Such problems are even more difficult in the presence of uncertainty. Although, Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) provide a formal framework for such problems, finding…
Derivatives are an important tool for single-objective optimization. In fact, it is commonly accepted that derivative-based methods present a better performance than derivative-free optimization approaches. In this work, we will show that…
High-dimensional classification has become an increasingly important problem. In this paper we propose a "Multivariate Adaptive Stochastic Search" (MASS) approach which first reduces the dimension of the data space and then applies a…
Non-prehensile manipulation in high-dimensional systems is challenging for a variety of reasons. One of the main reasons is the computationally long planning times that come with a large state space. Trajectory optimisation algorithms have…
We present a general framework for optimizing the Conditional Value-at-Risk for dynamical systems using stochastic search. The framework is capable of handling the uncertainty from the initial condition, stochastic dynamics, and uncertain…
Reasoning about human motion is a core component of modern human-robot interactive systems. In particular, one of the main uses of behavior prediction in autonomous systems is to inform robot motion planning and control. However, a majority…
Nonlinear optimal control problems for trajectory planning with obstacle avoidance present several challenges. While general-purpose optimizers and dynamic programming methods struggle when adopted separately, their combination enabled by a…
We present a unified framework for solving trajectory optimization problems in a derivative-free manner through the use of sequential convex programming. Traditionally, nonconvex optimization problems are solved by forming and solving a…
Nonlinear optimization-based control policies, such as those those arising in nonlinear Model Predictive Control, have seen remarkable success in recent years. These policies require solving computationally demanding nonlinear optimization…
A new method is developed for accurately approximating the solution to state-variable inequality path constrained optimal control problems using a multiple-domain adaptive Legendre-Gauss-Radau collocation method. The method consists of the…
This paper introduces a trajectory planning algorithm for search and coverage missions with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based on an uncertainty map that represents prior knowledge of the target region, modeled by a Gaussian Mixture…
Motion trajectory planning is one crucial aspect for automated vehicles, as it governs the own future behavior in a dynamically changing environment. A good utilization of a vehicle's characteristics requires the consideration of the…
Recent work on backpropagation-free learning has shown that it is possible to use forward-mode automatic differentiation (AD) to perform optimization on differentiable models. Forward-mode AD requires sampling a tangent vector for each…