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The current state-of-the-art gradient-based optimisation frameworks are able to produce impressive dynamic manoeuvres such as linear and rotational jumps. However, these methods, which optimise over the full rigid-body dynamics of the…
Humanoid robots dynamically navigate an environment by interacting with it via contact wrenches exerted at intermittent contact poses. Therefore, it is important to consider dynamics when planning a contact sequence. Traditional contact…
In this study, we present a novel method for enhancing the computational efficiency of whole-body control for humanoid robots, a challenge accentuated by their high degrees of freedom. The reduced-dimension rigid body dynamics of a floating…
Convex optimization is crucial in controlling legged robots, where stability and optimal control are vital. Many control problems can be formulated as convex optimization problems, with a convex cost function and constraints capturing…
Linear models for control and motion generation of humanoid robots have received significant attention in the past years, not only due to their well known theoretical guarantees, but also because of practical computational advantages.…
Difference-of-Convex (DC) minimization, referring to the problem of minimizing the difference of two convex functions, has been found rich applications in statistical learning and studied extensively for decades. However, existing methods…
Nonsmooth composite optimization with orthogonality constraints has a wide range of applications in statistical learning and data science. However, this problem is challenging due to its nonsmooth objective and computationally expensive…
In this paper, we propose an inexact block coordinate descent algorithm for large-scale nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems. At each iteration, a particular block variable is selected and updated by inexactly solving the original…
In this work we present a trajectory Optimization framework for whole-body motion planning through contacts. We demonstrate how the proposed approach can be applied to automatically discover different gaits and dynamic motions on a…
The general problem of planning feasible trajectories for multimodal robots is still an open challenge. This paper presents a whole-body trajectory optimisation approach that addresses this challenge by combining methods and tools developed…
Consider the problem of minimizing the sum of a smooth (possibly non-convex) and a convex (possibly nonsmooth) function involving a large number of variables. A popular approach to solve this problem is the block coordinate descent (BCD)…
We consider convex-concave saddle point problems with a separable structure and non-strongly convex functions. We propose an efficient stochastic block coordinate descent method using adaptive primal-dual updates, which enables flexible…
Deep Feedforward Neural Networks' (DFNNs) weights estimation relies on the solution of a very large nonconvex optimization problem that may have many local (no global) minimizers, saddle points and large plateaus. As a consequence,…
Block coordinate descent is a powerful algorithmic template suitable for big data optimization. This template admits a lot of variants including block gradient descent (BGD), which performs gradient descent on a selected block of variables,…
We present a novel, practical, and provable approach for solving diagonally constrained semi-definite programming (SDP) problems at scale using accelerated non-convex programming. Our algorithm non-trivially combines acceleration motions…
We present a novel method for global motion planning of robotic systems that interact with the environment through contacts. Our method directly handles the hybrid nature of such tasks using tools from convex optimization. We formulate the…
Distance measurements demonstrate distinctive scalability when used for relative state estimation in large-scale multi-robot systems. Despite the attractiveness of distance measurements, multi-robot relative state estimation based on…
In this paper we analyze the randomized block-coordinate descent (RBCD) methods proposed in [8,11] for minimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a block-separable convex function. In particular, we extend Nesterov's technique…
In this paper we consider the problem of minimizing a convex function using a randomized block coordinate descent method. One of the key steps at each iteration of the algorithm is determining the update to a block of variables. Existing…
Submodular function minimization is a fundamental optimization problem that arises in several applications in machine learning and computer vision. The problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time, but general purpose algorithms have…