University of Washington, USA
Policy Optimization in Control: Geometry and Algorithms
Abstract
First order methods have widely been adopted in design and optimization of large-scale dynamic systems. In recent years, there has been a surge of renewed research activities in adopting first order methods and their variants for direct policy optimization in feedback synthesis, providing an effective bridge for exploring how model and data fidelity effect stability and performance of synthesized dynamics systems. Such a perspective has also opened up a host of theoretical and computational questions at the heart of control theory. In this talk, I will provide an overview of this active area of research, followed by a host of related analytic and geometric insights and questions, as well as challenges and opportunities at the intersection of learning and control inspired by this line of work..
Biography
Mehran Mesbahi is the J. Ray Bowen Endowed Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Adjunct Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle, member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, and Executive Director of Joint Center for Aerospace Technology Innovation. He is a Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of AIAA, and recipient of NASA Space Act Award, University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award, and University of Washington College of Engineering Innovator Award. He is the co-author of the book “Graph Theoretic Methods in Multiagent Networks” published by Princeton University Press. His research interests are distributed and networked aerospace systems, autonomy, control theory, and learning.