Related papers: Pontryagin-Bellman Differential Dynamic Programmin…
Most mobile robots follow a modular sense-planact system architecture that can lead to poor performance or even catastrophic failure for visual inertial navigation systems due to trajectories devoid of feature matches. Planning in belief…
Constrained discrete optimization problems are encountered in many areas of communication and machine learning. We consider the case where the objective function satisfies Bellman's optimality principle without the constraints on which we…
The aim of this manuscript is to approach by means of first order differential equations/inclusions convex programming problems with two-block separable linear constraints and objectives, whereby (at least) one of the components of the…
In this paper, we address a minimum-time steering problem for a drone modeled as point mass with bounded acceleration, across a set of desired waypoints in the presence of gravity. We first provide a method to solve for the minimum-time…
The classical Dynamic Programming (DP) approach to optimal control problems is based on the characterization of the value function as the unique viscosity solution of a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation. The DP scheme for the numerical…
In real-world applications, it is important for machine learning algorithms to be robust against data outliers or corruptions. In this paper, we focus on improving the robustness of a large class of learning algorithms that are formulated…
Optimal control (OC) algorithms such as Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) take advantage of the derivatives of the dynamics to efficiently control physical systems. Yet, in the presence of nonsmooth dynamical systems, such class of…
To ensure the system stability of the $\bf{\mathcal{H}_{2}}$-guaranteed cost optimal decentralized control problem (ODC), an approximate semidefinite programming (SDP) problem is formulated based on the sparsity of the gain matrix of the…
This paper shows how to find lower bounds on, and sometimes solve globally, a large class of nonlinear optimal control problems with impulsive controls using semi-definite programming (SDP). This is done by relaxing an optimal control…
Powered descent guidance (PDG) problems subject to six-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) dynamics allow for enforcement of practical attitude constraints. However, numerical solutions to 6DOF PDG problems are challenging due to fast rotational…
A large class of decision making under uncertainty problems can be described via Markov decision processes (MDPs) or partially observable MDPs (POMDPs), with application to artificial intelligence and operations research, among others.…
In this work, we propose and study a new approach to formulate the optimal control problem of second-order differential equations, with a particular interest in those derived from force-controlled Lagrangian systems. The formulation results…
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…
Many inverse and parameter estimation problems can be written as PDE-constrained optimization problems. The goal, then, is to infer the parameters, typically coefficients of the PDE, from partial measurements of the solutions of the PDE for…
This paper studies optimal motion planning subject to motion and environment uncertainties. By modeling the system as a probabilistic labeled Markov decision process (PL-MDP), the control objective is to synthesize a finite-memory policy,…
In this paper, we derive first-order Pontryagin optimality conditions for risk-averse stochastic optimal control problems subject to final time inequality constraints, and whose costs are general, possibly non-smooth finite coherent risk…
One often encounters the curse of dimensionality in the application of dynamic programming to determine optimal policies for controlled Markov chains. In this paper, we provide a method to construct sub-optimal policies along with a bound…
This paper presents a novel method for reformulating non-differentiable collision avoidance constraints into smooth nonlinear constraints using strong duality of convex optimization. We focus on a controlled object whose goal is to avoid…
This paper aims to provide a Dynamic Programming (DP) approach to solve the Mission-Wide Chance-Constrained Optimal Control Problems (MWCC-OCP). The mission-wide chance constraint guarantees that the probability that the entire state…
In this work, we address the challenge of approximating unknown system dynamics and costs by representing them as a bilinear system using Koopman-based Inverse Optimal Control (IOC). Using optimal trajectories, we construct a bilinear…