Wednesday, April 19, 2023 01:00PM

Ph.D. Proposal

Manan Gandhi

(Advisor: Prof. Evangelos Theodorou)
 

Decision-Making Architectures for Control of Uncertain Systems
 

Wednesday, April 19th 

1:00 p.m.
Engineering, Science, and Mechanics Building 108

Abstract

From aggressive driving, to drone racing, to cardiovascular control, each of these problems involves uncertain dynamics and a requirement to make decisions. There are classical and modern techniques for controlling dynamical systems which can favor safety, exploration, control performance, or other criteria. InformationTheoretic Model Predictive Control (IF-MPC) has been utilized to significant effect for autonomous racing by optimizing the system free energy through forward sampling. This dissertation explores the ideas of incorporating
safety directly into importance sampling for the control of uncertain systems. The underpinnings of Model Predictive Path Integral control are presented with its connections to  both Information Theory and Bayesian inference. Current research on model learning for biological systems is presented with the aim of using more advanced control techniques. The core of the thesis is the development of a framework to perform safe model predictive control of stochastic dynamical systems while taking advantage of traditional control techniques to make decisions during operation. In the development of this novel framework, the foundation of modern, safe control is presented, along with state-of-the-art developments to enable safe control with fewer theoretical and computational restrictions. This work builds upon the idea of augmented importance sampling in IF-MPC to handle robustness, safety, and uncertainty in a general system. The control architecture presented here can handle both soft and hard constraints on the state of a dynamical system, as well as balance task completion with the notion of safety.


Committee


● Prof. Evangelos Theodorou – School of Aerospace Engineering (advisor)
● Prof. Wassim Haddad – 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