Related papers: Natural Functional Gradients for Smooth Trajectory…

Motion planning is still an open problem for many disciplines, e.g., robotics, autonomous driving, due to their need for high computational resources that hinder real-time, efficient decision-making. A class of methods striving to provide…

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…

In this paper, we propose a trajectory optimization for computing smooth collision free trajectories for nonholonomic curvature bounded vehicles among static and dynamic obstacles. One of the key novelties of our formulation is a hierarchal…

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…

In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

This paper introduces Function-space Adaptive Constrained Trajectory Optimization (FACTO), a new trajectory optimization algorithm for both single- and multi-arm manipulators. Trajectory representations are parameterized as linear…

We propose a class of very simple modifications of gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent. We show that when applied to a large variety of machine learning problems, ranging from logistic regression to deep neural nets, the…

Trajectory planning for mobile robots in cluttered environments remains a major challenge due to narrow passages, where conventional methods often fail or generate suboptimal paths. To address this issue, we propose the adaptive trajectory…

This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…

We propose a simple drop-in noise-tolerant replacement for the standard finite difference procedure used ubiquitously in blackbox optimization. In our approach, parameter perturbation directions are defined by a family of structured…

We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…

Force modulation of robotic manipulators has been extensively studied for several decades but is not yet commonly used in safety-critical applications due to a lack of accurate interaction contact modeling and weak performance guarantees -…

Neural Radiance Fields and Gaussian Splatting have recently transformed computer vision by enabling photo-realistic representations of complex scenes. However, they have seen limited application in real-world robotics tasks such as…

In this work, we propose a trajectory optimization approach for robot navigation in cluttered 3D environments. We represent the robot's geometry as a semialgebraic set defined by polynomial inequalities such that robots with general shapes…

Efficient trajectory optimization is essential for avoiding collisions in unstructured environments, but it remains challenging to have both speed and quality in the solutions. One reason is that second-order optimality requires calculating…

We present the first q-Gaussian smoothed functional (SF) estimator of the Hessian and the first Newton-based stochastic optimization algorithm that estimates both the Hessian and the gradient of the objective function using q-Gaussian…

Federated learning heavily relies on distributed gradient descent techniques. In the situation where gradient information is not available, the gradients need to be estimated from zeroth-order information, which typically involves computing…

This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…

Accurate and smooth global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning for pedestrians in urban canyons is still a challenge due to the multipath effects and the non-light-of-sight (NLOS) receptions caused by the reflections from…

This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…