CAREER: Real-time Convex Optimization for High-Performance Control of Autonomous Systems

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program grant will build innovative mathematical and computational methods of decision making for control of next generation high-performance autonomous systems. A broad range of emerging technologies utilize autonomy, including self-driving vehicles, quadrotors for delivery, search and rescue robots, mobile sensors for environmental monitoring, climate control systems for warehouses and buildings, automated drug dispensing, and next-generation power networks. Large-scale deployment of autonomous systems is a critical technological leap that will fundamentally transform our lives. Autonomous systems will maximize efficiency and reliability. Furthermore, they will improve safety by reducing or removing direct human involvement in hazardous tasks. However, autonomous systems present fundamentally difficult technical challenges to go beyond the limitations of the current state of the art in automation. This project lays the mathematical and computational foundations for a transformative approach to autonomy, one that makes previously impractical calculations tractable, and provides guaranteed levels of performance and stability. To meet fundamentally new and distinctly challenging performance and reliability requirements, future autonomous systems must make best possible decisions to control their actions without a human operator in the loop. They must utilize their full performance envelopes, while simultaneously satisfying critical mission and environmental constraints. Consequently, mathematical optimization problems are ubiquitous in autonomous control. Though optimization provides a powerful formulation framework, thus far real-time optimization based control has not transitioned to common practice due to shortcomings in the current algorithmic capabilities. To enable real-time optimization based control, this CAREER grant will develop a comprehensive theory of convexification -- formulation of control problems as tractable convex optimization problems -- enabling high performance control that is currently not achievable in many applications. Specifically, it will develop: accurate formulations of autonomous control problems as convex optimizations; customized numerical optimization algorithms that exploit problem structure for extremely fast and reliable onboard computations; and rigorous verification methods to certify the performance and robustness of the resulting autonomous control algorithms. These advances and resulting insights will also benefit systematic systems engineering and design for autonomous systems, high-level autonomous mission planning, and control of autonomous multi-agent systems. Collectively the theoretical and algorithmic products will form a strong technical foundation allowing the transition of real-time optimization-based control for autonomous systems into practice.