Policy Optimization for Control: Geometry and Algorithms

Event Date/Time

Friday, February 14, 2025 - 15:00

Location

Bowen Hall
222

Series/Event Type

MAE Departmental Seminars

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 in adopting first order methods and their variants for direct policy optimization in feedback synthesis, providing an direct bridge
to explore how models 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 autonomous systems. 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. If time permits, I will also provide an overview of ongoing projects at the University Washington in networked and autonomous aerospace systems.

Speaker Bio

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, and the Executive Director of Joint Center for Aerospace Technology Innovation. He is a Fellow of IEEE and AIAA, member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, 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. Mesbahi’s research interests are distributed and networked aerospace systems, autonomy, control theory, and learning.

Faculty Host

Leonard

Semester

Spring 2025