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Manan Gandhi
(Advisor: Prof. Evangelos Theodorou)
will propose a doctoral thesis entitled,
Decision-Making Architectures for Control of Uncertain Systems
On
Monday, April 4th at 10:00 a.m.
Montgomery Knight Building 317
https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_M2U5OTc2ODItODQ0ZC00Yjc3LWEzOTYtOTFkZGI4ZmQ2OWI1%40t
hread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22482198bb-ae7b-4b25-8b7a-6d7f32faa083%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22ce970eeb-3
bbe-4298-affa-61d04718da2d%22%7d
Abstract
From aggressive driving, to drone racing, to cardiovascular control, each of these problems involves
uncertain dynamics and a requirement to make decisions. There exist both classical and modern
techniques for control of dynamical systems which can be used to favor safety, exploration, control
performance, or other criteria. Information Theoretic Model Predictive Control (IF-MPC) has been
utilized to great effect for autonomous racing by optimizing the system free energy through forward
sampling. This proposal presents a framework to perform robust model predictive control of uncertain
dynamical systems while taking advantage of traditional control techniques to make decisions during
operation. This work builds upon the idea of augmented importance sampling in IF-MPC to handle
robustness, safety, and uncertainty in a general system. Additionally, this proposal includes future
research directions to handle hard safety constraints in the system state and multi-modality in the
decision space, while providing theoretical guarantees on the system free energy by leveraging existing
properties of modern control theory.
Committee
● Prof. Evangelos Theodorou – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)
● Prof. Joseph Saleh – School of Aerospace Engineering
● Prof. Jonathan Rogers– School of Aerospace Engineering
● Prof. Naira Hovakimyan– School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign
● David Kozlowski – Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories
● Dr. Demetri Yannopoulos – Department of Medicine Cardiovascular Division, University of
Minnesota
