- Date: November 11, 2022
MERL Contact: Avishai Weiss
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization
Brief - Avishai Weiss will give an invited talk at the William Maxwell Reed Seminar Series, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, University of Kentucky on "Fail-Safe Spacecraft Rendezvous." The talk will present some recent developments at MERL on guaranteeing safe rendezvous trajectories that avoid colliding with the target in the event of thruster anomalies.
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, October 26, 2022; 1:00 PM
Speaker: Ufuk Topcu, The University of Texas at Austin
MERL Host: Abraham P. Vinod
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization
Abstract - Autonomous systems are emerging as a driving technology for countlessly many applications. Numerous disciplines tackle the challenges toward making these systems trustworthy, adaptable, user-friendly, and economical. On the other hand, the existing disciplinary boundaries delay and possibly even obstruct progress. I argue that the nonconventional problems that arise in designing and verifying autonomous systems require hybrid solutions in the intersection of learning, formal methods, and controls. I will present examples of such hybrid solutions in the context of learning in sequential decision-making processes. These results offer novel means for effectively integrating physics-based, contextual, or structural prior knowledge into data-driven learning algorithms. They improve data efficiency by several orders of magnitude and generalizability to environments and tasks that the system had not experienced previously.
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- Date: October 24, 2022
Where: Online, 10/24/2022 9:00am (Eastern time)
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - Dr. Stefano Di Cairano (Senior Team Leader at MERL) has been invited to give a public talk at the first IEEE CSS Day event on the status, challenges, and role of control in autonomous driving.
The talk, titled "The Long Voyage Towards Autonomous Driving, with Control Systems as the Co-Pilot", will review some history of autonomous driving, some of the open challenges that control technology may help address, and the next steps towards full-autonomy. The talk is designed for a non-technical audience, to explain the role and impact of control in automated driving technology.
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- Date & Time: Friday, October 14, 2022; 11:00 AM
Speaker: Gianmario Pellegrino, Politecnico di Tornio, Italy
Research Areas: Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
Abstract 
This seminar presents a comprehensive design and simulation procedure for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines (PMSMs) for traction application. The design of heavily saturated traction PMSMs is a multidisciplinary engineering challenge that CAD software suites struggle to grasp, whereas design equations are way too approximated for the purpose. This tutorial will present the design toolchain of SyR-e, where magnetic and structural design equations are fast-FEA corrected for an insightful initial design, later FEA calibrated with free or commercial FEA tools. One e-motor will be designed from zero referring to the specs and size of the Tesla Model 3 rear-axle e-motor. The circuital model of one motor with inverter and discrete-time control will be automatically generated, in Simulink and PLECS, with accessible torque control source code, for simulation of healthy and faulty conditions, ready for real-time implementation (e.g. HiL).
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- Date & Time: Thursday, October 13, 2022; 1:30pm-2:30pm
Speaker: Prof. Shaoshuai Mou, Purdue University
MERL Host: Yebin Wang
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Abstract - Modern society has been relying more and more on engineering advance of autonomous systems, ranging from individual systems (such as a robotic arm for manufacturing, a self-driving car, or an autonomous vehicle for planetary exploration) to cooperative systems (such as a human-robot team, swarms of drones, etc). In this talk we will present our most recent progress in developing a fundamental framework for learning and control in autonomous systems. The framework comes from a differentiation of Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle and is able to provide a unified solution to three classes of learning/control tasks, i.e. adaptive autonomy, inverse optimization, and system identification. We will also present applications of this framework into human-autonomy teaming, especially in enabling an autonomous system to take guidance from human operators, which is usually sparse and vague.
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- Date: October 10, 2022 - October 11, 2022
Where: University of Freiburg, Germany
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - Rien Quirynen is an invited speaker at an international workshop on Embedded Optimization and Learning for Robotics and Mechatronics, which is organized by the ELO-X project at the University of Freiburg in Germany. This talk, entitled "Embedded learning, optimization and predictive control for autonomous vehicles", presents recent results from multiple projects at MERL that leverage embedded optimization, machine learning and optimal control for autonomous vehicles.
This workshop is part of the ELO-X Fall School and Workshop. Invited external lecturers will present state-of-the-art techniques and applications in the field of Embedded Optimization and Learning. ELO-X is a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 program.
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- Date: September 21, 2022
MERL Contacts: Philip V. Orlik; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) invites qualified postdoctoral candidates to apply for the position of Postdoctoral Research Fellow. This position provides early career scientists the opportunity to work at a unique, academically-oriented industrial research laboratory. Successful candidates will be expected to define and pursue their own original research agenda, explore connections to established laboratory initiatives, and publish high impact articles in leading venues. Please refer to our web page for further details.
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- Date: June 8, 2022
Where: 2022 American Control Conference
MERL Contacts: Ankush Chakrabarty; Christopher R. Laughman
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
Brief - Researchers from EPFL (Wenjie Xu, Colin Jones) and EMPA (Bratislav Svetozarevic), in collaboration with MERL researchers Ankush Chakrabarty and Chris Laughman, recently won the ASME Energy Systems Technical Committee Best Paper Award at the 2022 American Control Conference for their work on "VABO: Violation-Aware Bayesian Optimization for Closed-Loop Performance Optimization with Unmodeled Constraints" out of 19 nominations and 3 finalists. The paper describes a data-driven framework for optimizing the performance of constrained control systems by systematically re-evaluating how cautiously/aggressively one should explore the search space to avoid sustained, large-magnitude constraint violations while tolerating small violations, and demonstrates these methods on a physics-based model of a vapor compression cycle.
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- Date: June 8, 2022 - June 10, 2022
Where: Atlanta, GA
MERL Contacts: Scott A. Bortoff; Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Christopher R. Laughman; Abraham P. Vinod; Avishai Weiss
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - At the American Control Conference in Atlanta, GA, MERL presented 9 papers on subjects including autonomous-vehicle decision making and motion planning, realtime Bayesian inference and learning, reference governors for hybrid systems, Bayesian optimization, and nonlinear control.
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- Date: April 1, 2022
Where: INFORMS Journal on Computing (https://pubsonline.informs.org/journal/ijoc)
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan co-authored a publication titled "JANOS: An Integrated Predictive and Prescriptive Modeling Framework" which has been chosen as a Featured Article in the current issue of the INFORMS Journal on Computing. The article was co-authored with Prof. David Bergman, a collaborator of MERL and Teng Huang, a former MERL intern, among others.
The paper describes a new software tool, JANOS, that integrates predictive modeling and discrete optimization to assist decision making. Specifically, the proposed solver takes as input user-specified pretrained predictive models and formulates optimization models directly over those predictive models by embedding them within an optimization model through linear transformations.
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- Date: May 4, 2022
MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Optimization, Signal Processing
Brief - Toshiaki Koike-Akino gave an invited lecture on advanced photonic devices at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Technology Fair on May 4, 2022. Topics of the lecture included the recent progress of applied artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for optical systems, nano-photonic devices, and quantum technology. During the 2-hour interactive online presentation, he lectured to more than 200 patent examiner participants.
USPTO Tech Fair Organizer mentioned:
"Thank you very much for representing Advanced Photonic Devices at this year’s Technology Center 2800 Virtual Tech Fair held May 4th, 2022. Tech Fair is an important part of the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Examiner Technical Training Program (PETTP). Having a scientifically well-trained examiner workforce and ensuring the quality, consistency, and reliability of issued patents are top priorities at the USPTO. The PETTP is designed to achieve those priorities by giving examiners direct access to technical experts who are willing to share their knowledge about prior art and industry standards for both emerging and established technologies. Experts like yourself help to maintain our high quality of patent examination by keeping examiners updated on technologies and innovations pertinent to their field of examination.
We very much appreciate your efforts, time, and contributions."
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, May 3, 2022; 1:00 PM
Speaker: Michael Posa, University of Pennsylvania
MERL Host: Devesh K. Jha
Research Areas: Control, Optimization, Robotics
Abstract 
Machine learning has shown incredible promise in robotics, with some notable recent demonstrations in manipulation and sim2real transfer. These results, however, require either an accurate a priori model (for simulation) or a large amount of data. In contrast, my lab is focused on enabling robots to enter novel environments and then, with minimal time to gather information, accomplish complex tasks. In this talk, I will argue that the hybrid or contact-driven nature of real-world robotics, where a robot must safely and quickly interact with objects, drives this high data requirement. In particular, the inductive biases inherent in standard learning methods fundamentally clash with the non-differentiable physics of contact-rich robotics. Focusing on model learning, or system identification, I will show both empirical and theoretical results which demonstrate that contact stiffness leads to poor training and generalization, leading to some healthy skepticism of simulation experiments trained on artificially soft environments. Fortunately, implicit learning formulations, which embed convex optimization problems, can dramatically reshape the optimization landscape for these stiff problems. By carefully reasoning about the roles of stiffness and discontinuity, and integrating non-smooth structures, we demonstrate dramatically improved learning performance. Within this family of approaches, ContactNets accurately identifies the geometry and dynamics of a six-sided cube bouncing, sliding, and rolling across a surface from only a handful of sample trajectories. Similarly, a piecewise-affine hybrid system with thousands of modes can be identified purely from state transitions. Time permitting, I'll discuss how these learned models can be deployed for control via recent results in real-time, multi-contact MPC.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, April 12, 2022; 11:00 AM EDT
Speaker: Sebastien Gros, NTNU
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization
Abstract 
Reinforcement Learning (RL), similarly to many AI-based techniques, is currently receiving a very high attention. RL is most commonly supported by classic Machine Learning techniques, i.e. typically Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). While there are good motivations for using DNNs in RL, there are also significant drawbacks. The lack of “explainability” of the resulting control policies, and the difficulty to provide guarantees on their closed-loop behavior (safety, stability) makes DNN-based policies problematic in many applications. In this talk, we will discuss an alternative approach to support RL, via formal optimal control tools based on Model Predictive Control (MPC). This approach alleviates the issues detailed above, but also presents some challenges. In this talk, we will discuss why MPC is a valid tool to support RL, and how MPC can be combined with RL (RLMPC). We will then discuss some recent results regarding this combination, the known challenges, and the kind of control applications where we believe that RLMPC will be a valuable approach.
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- Date: March 10, 2022
Where: Department of Mathematics, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan will present the Optimization and System Theorem seminar in the Department of Mathematics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The title of the talk is Recursive McCormick Linearizations of Multilinear Programs: Minimum Size Formulations.
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- Date: February 24, 2022
Research Areas: Control, Optimization
Brief - Rien Quirynen has accepted an invitation to serve on the editorial board of Journal of Optimal Control Applications and Methods (OCAM) as an Associate Editor.
OCAM provides a forum for papers on the full range of optimal control and related control design methods. The aim is to encourage new developments in optimal control theory and design methodologies that may lead to advances in real control applications.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, February 8, 2022; 1:00 PM EST
Speaker: Raphaël Pestourie, MIT
MERL Host: Matthew Brand
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Optimization
Abstract 
Thin large-area structures with aperiodic subwavelength patterns can unleash the full power of Maxwell’s equations for focusing light and a variety of other wave transformation or optical applications. Because of their irregularity and large scale, capturing the full scattering through these devices is one of the most challenging tasks for computational design: enter extreme optics! This talk will present ways to harness the full computational power of modern large-scale optimization in order to design optical devices with thousands or millions of free parameters. We exploit various methods of domain-decomposition approximations, supercomputer-scale topology optimization, laptop-scale “surrogate” models based on Chebyshev interpolation and/or new scientific machine learning models, and other techniques to attack challenging problems: achromatic lenses that simultaneously handle many wavelengths and angles, “deep” images, hyperspectral imaging, and more.
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- Date: May 31, 2022
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan from MERL's Data Analytics group has been invited to serve on the The Howard Rosenbrock Prize committee. Instituted in 2015, Optimization and Engineering journal's Howard Rosenbrock Prize is awarded annually to honor the authors of the best paper published in the journal in the previous year.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, December 9, 2021; 1:00pm - 5:30pm EST
Location: Virtual Event
Speaker: Prof. Melanie Zeilinger, ETH
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Digital Video, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
Brief - MERL is excited to announce the second keynote speaker for our Virtual Open House 2021:
Prof. Melanie Zeilinger from ETH .
Our virtual open house will take place on December 9, 2021, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).
Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities. Prof. Zeilinger's talk is scheduled for 3:15pm - 3:45pm (EST).
Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/merlvoh2021
Keynote Title: Control Meets Learning - On Performance, Safety and User Interaction
Abstract: With increasing sensing and communication capabilities, physical systems today are becoming one of the largest generators of data, making learning a central component of autonomous control systems. While this paradigm shift offers tremendous opportunities to address new levels of system complexity, variability and user interaction, it also raises fundamental questions of learning in a closed-loop dynamical control system. In this talk, I will present some of our recent results showing how even safety-critical systems can leverage the potential of data. I will first briefly present concepts for using learning for automatic controller design and for a new safety framework that can equip any learning-based controller with safety guarantees. The second part will then discuss how expert and user information can be utilized to optimize system performance, where I will particularly highlight an approach developed together with MERL for personalizing the motion planning in autonomous driving to the individual driving style of a passenger.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, December 9, 2021; 1:00pm - 5:30pm EST
Location: Virtual Event
Speaker: Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan, Rice University
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Digital Video, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
Brief - MERL is excited to announce the first keynote speaker for our Virtual Open House 2021:
Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan from Rice University.
Our virtual open house will take place on December 9, 2021, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).
Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities. Prof. Veeraraghavan's talk is scheduled for 1:15pm - 1:45pm (EST).
Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/merlvoh2021
Keynote Title: Computational Imaging: Beyond the limits imposed by lenses.
Abstract: The lens has long been a central element of cameras, since its early use in the mid-nineteenth century by Niepce, Talbot, and Daguerre. The role of the lens, from the Daguerrotype to modern digital cameras, is to refract light to achieve a one-to-one mapping between a point in the scene and a point on the sensor. This effect enables the sensor to compute a particular two-dimensional (2D) integral of the incident 4D light-field. We propose a radical departure from this practice and the many limitations it imposes. In the talk we focus on two inter-related research projects that attempt to go beyond lens-based imaging.
First, we discuss our lab’s recent efforts to build flat, extremely thin imaging devices by replacing the lens in a conventional camera with an amplitude mask and computational reconstruction algorithms. These lensless cameras, called FlatCams can be less than a millimeter in thickness and enable applications where size, weight, thickness or cost are the driving factors. Second, we discuss high-resolution, long-distance imaging using Fourier Ptychography, where the need for a large aperture aberration corrected lens is replaced by a camera array and associated phase retrieval algorithms resulting again in order of magnitude reductions in size, weight and cost. Finally, I will spend a few minutes discussing how the wholistic computational imaging approach can be used to create ultra-high-resolution wavefront sensors.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, December 9, 2021; 100pm-5:30pm (EST)
Location: Virtual Event
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Digital Video, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories cordially invites you to join our Virtual Open House, on December 9, 2021, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).
The event will feature keynotes, live sessions, research area booths, and time for open interactions with our researchers. Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities.
Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/merlvoh2021
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- Date: October 21, 2021
Where: Université de Lorraine, France
MERL Contact: Ankush Chakrabarty
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
Brief - Ankush Chakrabarty (RS, Multiphysical Systems Team) gave an invited talk on `Bayesian-Optimized Estimation and Control for Buildings and HVAC' at the Research Center for Automatic Control (CRAN) in the University of Lorraine in France. The talk presented recent MERL research on probabilistic machine learning for set-point optimization and calibration of digital twins for building energy systems.
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- Date: September 17, 2021 - October 31, 2021
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - Diego Romeres, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, is serving as an Associate Editor (AE) for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, September 14, 2021; 1:00 PM EST
Speaker: Prof. David Bergman, University of Connecticut
MERL Host: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Areas: Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Optimization
Abstract 
The integration of machine learning and optimization opens the door to new modeling paradigms that have already proven successful across a broad range of industries. Sports betting is a particularly exciting application area, where recent advances in both analytics and optimization can provide a lucrative edge. In this talk we will discuss three algorithmic sports betting games where combinations of machine learning and optimization have netted me significant winnings.
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- Date: August 12, 2021
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - Anthony Vetro gave a keynote at the inaugural IEEE Conference on Autonomous Systems (ICAS), which was held virtually from August 11-13, 2021. The talk focused on challenges and recent progress in the area of robotic manipulation. The conference is sponsored by IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) through the SPS Autonomous Systems Initiative.
Abstract: Human-level manipulation continues to be beyond the capabilities of today’s robotic systems. Not only do current industrial robots require significant time to program a specific task, but they lack the flexibility to generalize to other tasks and be robust to changes in the environment. While collaborative robots help to reduce programming effort and improve the user interface, they still fall short on generalization and robustness. This talk will highlight recent advances in a number of key areas to improve the manipulation capabilities of autonomous robots, including methods to accurately model the dynamics of the robot and contact forces, sensors and signal processing algorithms to provide improved perception, optimization-based decision-making and control techniques, as well as new methods of interactivity to accelerate and enhance robot learning.
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- Date: July 12, 2021
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization
Brief - MERL researcher Rien Quirynen will present work in collaboration with Karl Berntorp on "Uncertainty Propagation by Linear Regression Kalman Filters for Stochastic Nonlinear MPC" as a keynote speaker at the 7th IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control 2021 on July, 12th. The paper is 1 out of 5 keynote presentations chosen among more than 50 accepted papers at the conference. An abstract of the talk can be found in the link below.
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