Control Group and OHMC Seminars: Melanie Zeilinger, ETH Zürich

Control Group and OHMC Seminars start again

Speaker: Prof Dr Melanie Zeilinger, ETH Zürich

Title: An Optimization-based Approach to Safe and Efficient Learning-based Control

Abstract: Numerous demonstrations have highlighted the potential of learning-based control paradigms over the last years. A number of both practical and theoretical challenges arising from the use of learning in closed-loop control systems, however, are still limiting the widespread success of these promising techniques in practice. In this talk, I will focus on the questions of data-efficiency and safety. In order to provide a scalable and flexible approach for complex systems, the techniques will build on optimization-based control. The first part of the talk will discuss techniques for learning objective and dynamics models, which are both real-time capable and allow for fast online adaptation despite limited initial data and information for a particular task at hand. In the second part, I will present the concept of a predictive safety filter to augment any learning-based controller with safety guarantees and will outline connections to techniques based on control barrier functions. The results will be highlighted using examples from robotics.

Bio: Melanie Zeilinger is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich, Switzerland where she leads the Intelligent Control Systems group. She is one of the founders of the new Conference on Learning for Dynamics and Control (L4DC) and organizer of numerous sessions and events in the growing field of learning-based control. She currently serves as Associate Editor for the IEEE Control Systems Magazine and the IEEE Control Systems Letters. She received the Diploma degree in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 2006, and the Ph.D. degree with honors in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2011. From 2011 to 2012 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany until 2015 and with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, CA, USA, from 2012 to 2014. From 2018 to 2019 she was a professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her research interests are centered around learning-based control with applications to robotics and human-in-the-loop control.

Zoom: https://newnham.zoom.us/j/92544958528pwd=YS9PcGRnbXBOcStBdStNb3E0SHN1UT09

Meeting ID: 925 4495 8528

Passcode: 203369

The seminar is hosted by Prof Jan Maciejowski.