Related papers: Second-Order Convergent Collision-Constrained Opti…
Motion Planning (MP) is a critical challenge in robotics, especially pertinent with the burgeoning interest in embodied artificial intelligence. Traditional MP methods often struggle with high-dimensional complexities. Recently neural…
This paper presents a novel robust trajectory optimization method for constrained nonlinear dynamical systems subject to unknown bounded disturbances. In particular, we seek optimal control policies that remain robustly feasible with…
In numerical simulations of many charged systems at the micro/nano scale, a common theme is the repeated solution of the Poisson-Boltzmann equation. This task proves challenging, if not entirely infeasible, largely due to the nonlinearity…
B* is a novel optimization framework that addresses a critical challenge in fixed-base manipulator robotics: optimal base placement. Current methods rely on pre-computed kinematics databases generated through sampling to search for…
Inverse kinematics (IK) is the problem of finding robot joint configurations that satisfy constraints on the position or pose of one or more end-effectors. For robots with redundant degrees of freedom, there is often an infinite, nonconvex…
We propose a new methodology to design first-order methods for unconstrained strongly convex problems. Specifically, instead of tackling the original objective directly, we construct a shifted objective function that has the same minimizer…
First-order optimization methods tend to inherently favor certain solutions over others when minimizing an underdetermined training objective that has multiple global optima. This phenomenon, known as implicit bias, plays a critical role in…
Rather than traditional position control, impedance control is preferred to ensure the safe operation of industrial robots programmed from demonstrations. However, variable stiffness learning studies have focused on task performance rather…
In this paper we propose a second--order method for solving \emph{linear composite sparse optimization problems} consisting of minimizing the sum of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex function) and a nondifferentiable convex term. The…
In this series of papers, we present a motion planning framework for planning comfortable and customizable motion of nonholonomic mobile robots such as intelligent wheelchairs and autonomous cars. In Part I, we presented the mathematical…
This paper studies a fundamental problem in convex optimization, which is to solve semidefinite programming (SDP) with high accuracy. This paper follows from the existing robust SDP-based interior point method analysis due to [Huang, Jiang,…
The proximal bundle method (PBM) is a fundamental and computationally effective algorithm for solving nonsmooth optimization problems. In this paper, we present the first variant of the PBM for smooth objectives, achieving an accelerated…
Large scale optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning and data analysis and there is a plethora of algorithms for solving such problems. Many of these algorithms employ sub-sampling, as a way to either speed up the…
Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide an elegant framework for constraining nonlinear control system dynamics to remain within an invariant subset of a designated safe set. However, identifying a CBF that balances performance-by…
This paper presents the design and analysis of a Hybrid High-Order (HHO) approximation for a distributed optimal control problem governed by the Poisson equation. We propose three distinct schemes to address unconstrained control problems…
Discrete optimization belongs to the set of $\mathcal{NP}$-hard problems, spanning fields such as mixed-integer programming and combinatorial optimization. A current standard approach to solving convex discrete optimization problems is the…
Considerable efforts have been devoted to Oriented Object Detection (OOD). However, one lasting issue regarding the discontinuity in Oriented Bounding Box (OBB) representation remains unresolved, which is an inherent bottleneck for extant…
We consider path planning for a rigid spatial robot with 6 degrees of freedom (6 DOFs), moving amidst polyhedral obstacles. A correct, complete and practical path planner for such a robot has never been achieved, although this is widely…
In this paper, we use Proximal Cubic regularized Newton Methods (PCNM) to optimize the sum of a smooth convex function and a non-smooth convex function, where we use inexact gradient and Hessian, and an inexact subsolver for the cubic…
We prove lower bounds for higher-order methods in smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization. Our contribution is threefold: We first show that a deterministic algorithm cannot profit from the finite-sum structure of the objective, and that…