Related papers: Trajectory Optimization Under Stochastic Dynamics …
Accurately and proactively alerting drivers or automated systems to emerging collisions is crucial for road safety, particularly in highly interactive and complex urban environments. Existing methods either require labour-intensive…
Models incorporating uncertain inputs, such as random forces or material parameters, have been of increasing interest in PDE-constrained optimization. In this paper, we focus on the efficient numerical minimization of a convex and smooth…
Data-Driven Predictive Control (DPC) optimizes system behavior directly from measured trajectories without requiring an explicit model. However, its computational cost scales with dataset size, limiting real-time applicability to nonlinear…
This paper presents a tool for addressing a key component in many algorithms for planning robot trajectories under uncertainty: evaluation of the safety of a robot whose actions are governed by a closed-loop feedback policy near a nominal…
This paper addresses planning and control of robot motion under uncertainty that is formulated as a continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic optimal control problem, by developing a topology-guided path integral control method. The path…
We develop a tractable and flexible approach for incorporating side information into dynamic optimization under uncertainty. The proposed framework uses predictive machine learning methods (such as $k$-nearest neighbors, kernel regression,…
Reconstructing dynamics using samples from sparsely time-resolved snapshots is an important problem in both natural sciences and machine learning. Here, we introduce a new deep learning approach for solving regularized unbalanced optimal…
Differential drive robots are widely used in various scenarios thanks to their straightforward principle, from household service robots to disaster response field robots. There are several types of driving mechanisms for real-world…
Safely deploying robots in uncertain and dynamic environments requires a systematic accounting of various risks, both within and across layers in an autonomy stack from perception to motion planning and control. Many widely used motion…
We describe an adaptive importance sampling algorithm for rare events that is based on a dual stochastic control formulation of a path sampling problem. Specifically, we focus on path functionals that have the form of cumulate generating…
Autonomous mobile robots are increasingly used in pedestrian-rich environments where safe navigation and appropriate human interaction are crucial. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) enables socially integrated robot behavior,…
Robot navigation around humans can be a challenging problem since human movements are hard to predict. Stochastic model predictive control (MPC) can account for such uncertainties and approximately bound the probability of a collision to…
We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…
The optimal control of a mechanical system is of crucial importance in many realms. Typical examples are the determination of a time-minimal path in vehicle dynamics, a minimal energy trajectory in space mission design, or optimal motion…
We present an algorithm for the efficient sampling of conditional paths of stochastic differential equations (SDEs). While unconditional path sampling of SDEs is straightforward, albeit expensive for high dimensional systems of SDEs,…
This paper addresses risk awareness of stochastic optimization problems. Nested risk measures appear naturally in this context, as they allow beneficial reformulations for algorithmic treatments. The reformulations presented extend usual…
In this paper, we consider a modified version of the control problem in a model free Markov decision process (MDP) setting with large state and action spaces. The control problem most commonly addressed in the contemporary literature is to…
The urban environment is amongst the most difficult domains for autonomous vehicles. The vehicle must be able to plan a safe route on challenging road layouts, in the presence of various dynamic traffic participants such as vehicles,…
In this paper we provide a thorough, rigorous theoretical framework to assess optimality guarantees of sampling-based algorithms for drift control systems: systems that, loosely speaking, can not stop instantaneously due to momentum. We…
This paper presents a novel methodology that uses surrogate models in the form of neural networks to reduce the computation time of simulation-based optimization of a reference trajectory. Simulation-based optimization is necessary when…