Congratulations! We start a new NSF-AoF collaborative research project: Safe Reinforcement Learning in Non-Stationary Environments With Fast Adaptation and Disturbance Prediction. This project aims to develop a framework to enable safe and efficient reinforcement learning for robot control in non-stationary environments, leveraging control theoretical tools for fast adaptation and perception-based disturbance prediction. Finnish Partners: Reza […]

Our presentation at the IEEE CCTA workshop on Multi-Vehicle and Assured Autonomous Control for Aerospace Applications can be downloaded here.  

Congratulations to Arun and Gabriel! They defended their Ph.D. final exams successfully! Here are the final defense recordings. Safe Planning and Control for Uncertain Nonlinear Systems via L1-Adaptive Control and Contraction Analysis Arun Lakshmanan The link to the video is https://uofi.box.com/s/zlsgmiykberl65bmnte0fmcbcz6sqt8y.   Efficient Risk-Averse Algorithms for Air-Ground Payload Transfers Gabriel Barsi Haberfeld The link to […]

Congratulations to Javier! He defended his Ph.D. final exam successfully! The final defense video is attached. The link to the video is https://uofi.box.com/s/51uvsvls20ehkqjm9behwdwb49od03tj.

Congratulations to Alexandre Barbosa for winning the Stanley I. Weiss Outstanding Thesis Award! Please check MechSE News.

New lab members! A  welcome to Erin Swansen and Minjun Sung who joined the lab this Spring.

Congratulations to Kasey, Andrew, and Arun for the successful preliminary exams for their Ph.D.! Kasey Ackerman The preliminary proposal title: L1 Adaptive Control for Nonlinear Reference Systems with Unmatched Uncertainties Arun Lakshmanan The preliminary proposal title: Safe Planning and Control for Uncertain Nonlinear Systems via L1-Adaptive Control and Contraction Analysis Andrew Patterson The preliminary proposal […]

Please check the following three papers presented at CDC 2020. A Safety Constrained Control Framework for UAVs in GPS Denied Environment Wenbin Wan, Hunmin Kim, Naira Hovakimyan, Lui Sha, and Petros G. Voulgaris Presentation Slides  |  Presentation Video  |  Paper Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) suffer from sensor drifts in GPS denied environments, which can lead to potentially […]

Congratulations! Our paper “f-Divergence Variational Inference” got accepted by NeurIPS 2020! Link: Paper (Arxiv) |  Video f-Divergence Variational Inference Neng Wan*, Dapeng Li*, and Naira Hovakimyan Abstract: This paper introduces the f-divergence variational inference (f-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all f-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate f-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with […]

Professor Naira Hovakimyan gave a technical talk on “Safe Learning and Control with L1 Adaptation”. Links: Robotics Today Presentation Video