We have our third seminar for the TC seminar series on Friday (17th Feb 2023) at 10:00AM EST. Please find the flyer with all the details at this link.

Speaker: Justin Carpentier

Title: Progress and prospects in optimization for control and learning in robotics

Abstract: Over the past decades, optimisation has become a core component of robotics. It provides a consistent and flexible way to formalise and solve complex problems in robotics, ranging from simulation to learning and control. While writing optimisation solvers was initially the job of specialists in optimisation, the past few years have seen the emergence of new solvers developed by roboticists, and for robotics. This paradigm change corresponds to a turning point in the community, justified by the absence of off-the-shelf solvers capable of precisely and efficiently handling the specific features of robotic problems. In this talk, I will present a general overview of our recent contributions to optimisation for robotics. In the first part, I will first review contributions around the development of generic and efficient solvers to tackle a wide variety of optimisation problems arising in robotics, ranging from standard quadratic problems (QPs) to nonlinear problems (NLPs) and trajectory optimisation problems (TO). The second part will deal with physical simulation. I will highlight recent progress to improve simulator accuracy and efficiency and draw some perspectives about differentiating physics, which is by nature non-smooth.

Date: Friday, February 17th

Time: 10:00 - 11:00AM EST (GMT -5:00)

Link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/91247893326?pwd=L2JWU21aQzc4cU1ZQklEb0QrWGQvdz09

More details on upcoming seminars (and video links for past ones) can be found here.