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Non-linear Trajectory Optimisation (TO) methods require good initial guesses to converge to a locally optimal solution. A feasible guess can often be obtained by allocating a large amount of time for the trajectory to complete. However for…
Online motion planning is a challenging problem for intelligent robots moving in dense environments with dynamic obstacles, e.g., crowds. In this work, we propose a novel approach for optimal and safe online motion planning with minimal…
We address the problem of finding an optimal policy in a Markov decision process under a restricted policy class defined by the convex hull of a set of base policies. This problem is of great interest in applications in which a number of…
We propose a sampling-based trajectory optimization methodology for constrained problems. We extend recent works on stochastic search to deal with box control constraints,as well as nonlinear state constraints for discrete dynamical…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in decision-making and control tasks, but the risk is very high for the agent in the training process due to the requirements of interaction with the environment, which seriously limits its…
Parallel trajectory optimization via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) has emerged as a scalable approach to long-horizon motion planning. However, existing frameworks typically decompose the problem into parallel…
Robots have become increasingly prevalent in dynamic and crowded environments such as airports and shopping malls. In these scenarios, the critical challenges for robot navigation are reliability and timely arrival at predetermined…
Autonomous vehicles must navigate dynamically uncertain environments while balancing safety and efficiency. This challenge is exacerbated by unpredictable human-driven vehicle (HV) behaviors and perception inaccuracies, necessitating…
We study unconstrained smooth convex optimization under stochastic first- and zeroth-order oracles subject only to finite-moment bounds, naturally admitting persistent bias and heavy-tailed noise. In this hostile environment, integrating…
Task robust adaptation is a long-standing pursuit in sequential decision-making. Some risk-averse strategies, e.g., the conditional value-at-risk principle, are incorporated in domain randomization or meta reinforcement learning to…
Operating cloud service infrastructures requires high energy efficiency while ensuring a satisfactory service level. Motivated by data centers, we consider a workload routing and server speed control policy applicable to the system…
Recent years have witnessed a tremendous improvement of deep reinforcement learning. However, a challenging problem is that an agent may suffer from inefficient exploration, particularly for on-policy methods. Previous exploration methods…
Static stochastic VRPs aim at modeling real-life VRPs by considering uncertainty on data. In particular, the SS-VRPTW-CR considers stochastic customers with time windows and does not make any assumption on their reveal times, which are…
Finding the most likely path to a set of failure states is important to the analysis of safety-critical systems that operate over a sequence of time steps, such as aircraft collision avoidance systems and autonomous cars. In many…
We study the problem of deploying a fleet of mobile robots to service tasks that arrive stochastically over time and at random locations in an environment. This is known as the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem (DVRP) and requires robots to…
Existing intelligent driving technology often has a problem in balancing smooth driving and fast obstacle avoidance, especially when the vehicle is in a non-structural environment, and is prone to instability in emergency situations.…
Navigation tasks often cannot be defined in terms of a target, either because global position information is unavailable or unreliable or because target location is not explicitly known a priori. This task is then often defined indirectly…
We consider the problem of selecting the best variable-value strategy for solving a given problem in constraint programming. We show that the recent Embarrassingly Parallel Search method (EPS) can be used for this purpose. EPS proposes to…
We develop a stochastic approximation-type algorithm to solve finite state/action, infinite-horizon, risk-aware Markov decision processes. Our algorithm has two loops. The inner loop computes the risk by solving a stochastic saddle-point…
We develop a control algorithm that ensures the safety, in terms of confinement in a set, of a system with unknown, 2nd-order nonlinear dynamics. The algorithm establishes novel connections between data-driven and robust, nonlinear control.…