Joint IFAC/IEEE CSS webinar series

The main objectives of the webinar series are to bring forward IFAC values on open science in automatic control, to reach nonlinear control researchers and practitioners in all parts of the world and to promote the latest research activities in the field of nonlinear control systems worldwide. The invited speakers will present their works based on the latest pre-print in journals that has not been presented in conferences. The next speaker is Miroslav Krstic on the 13th of October. See below for more information.

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The next webinar in this series will be given by Prof. Miroslav Krstic, Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, UC San Diego, USA.

Date: 5:00 pm Central Europe Time / 8:00 am Pacific Time] on Thursday, October 13, 2022. 

Zoom:  https://uniroma1.zoom.us/j/85794813444?pwd=WXZYQitGRWxKbTU4ZDd2YnR1d3Zwdz09 

Live streaming on youtube: to be updated 

The recorded session will be made available in the IFAC youtube channel: to be updated

Title: Inverse Optimal Safe Control

Abstract: CBF-QP safety filters are pointwise minimizers of the control effort at a given state vector, i.e., "myopically optimal" at each time instant. But are they optimal over the entire infinite time horizon? They are not. In fact, what does it even mean for a controlled dynamic system to be "optimally safe” as opposed to, conventionally, "optimally stabilized"? Moreover, when disturbances - deterministic and stochastic - have unknown upper bounds (or covariance, in the stochastic case), how should safety be defined to allow a graceful degradation under disturbances; and can safety filters be designed to guarantee such weaker (disturbance-impacted) safety properties as well as the optimality of safety over the infinite time horizon? In this talk I answer these questions for general systems affine in control and disturbances, illustrate the answers with examples, and, using the existing QP safety filters, as well as more general safety-ensuring feedbacks, show how one generates entire families of safety filters which are optimal over the infinite horizon, as well as “safer” than the min-norm/QP filters. Time permitting, I may present safety filters for a “positively-constrained” operation of PDEs, as well as prescribed-time safety filters with CBFs of relative degree higher than one.

The webinar is organized by Claudia Califano (vice-chair education of IFAC TC 2.3), Bayu Jayawardhana (vice-chair publication of IFAC TC 2.3), Christophe Prieur (chair of IFAC TC 2.3 Non-linear Control Systems) and Andrea Serrani (chair of IEEE TC Nonlinear Systems and Control).

Past webinars: