Optimisation based Control: Opportunities and Challenges

Prof Wen-Hua Chen, FIEEE CEng FIMechE FIET

EPSRC Established Career Fellow

Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Loughborough University

Loughborough, Leicestershire, UK.

W.Chen@lboro.ac.uk

陈文华教授，英国拉夫堡大学 航空与汽车工程系

Abstract

With the increase of the size and the complexity of systems and their performance specifications, it is more and more difficult to find analytic solutions for a control system as in traditional approaches to give optimal performance. We use a control system here in a much loose term, which includes online planning, decision making and management in autonomous systems. Model Predictive Control (MPC), or receding horizon control, provides a promising mechanism to realise numerical optimal solutions online to achieve best possible performance. However, establishing stability and other formal properties of this type of optimisation-based control imposes significant challenges. This talk first discusses the importance and opportunities of optimisation-based control, and then focus on the challenges in analysis and design of this type of much more complicated control systems. Particularly, with an optimiser in the closed-loop, how to understand its stability and safety and analyse the behaviour and performance under disturbance and uncertainty demands a new generation of control theory and tools. Some new results in stability analysis and disturbance preview will be reported. It argues more research into understanding the interaction between optimisation and feedback loops in both the AI and the control community is necessary so as to ensure efficiency and safety of future highly automated society.    

Bio.

Dr Wen-Hua Chen holds Professor in Autonomous Vehicles in the Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering at Loughborough University, UK. Prof. Chen has a considerable experience in control, signal processing and artificial intelligence and their applications in aerospace, automotive and agriculture systems. In the last 15 years, he has been working on the development and application of unmanned aircraft system and intelligent vehicle technologies, spanning autopilots, situational awareness, decision making, verification, remote sensing for precision agriculture and environment monitoring. He is a Chartered Engineer, and a Fellow of IEEE, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institution of Engineering and Technology, UK. He was awarded Changjiang Chair Professor by the Chinese Ministry of Education in 2012. Recently Prof Chen was awarded a 5-years UK EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Science Research Council) Established Career Fellowship in developing control theory for next generation of control systems to enable high levels of automation such as robotics, autonomous systems and smart cities.

  陈文华博士是英国拉夫堡大学航空与汽车工程系自动驾驶汽车教授。 陈教授在控制、信号处理和人工智能及其在航空航天、汽车和农业系统中的应用方面拥有丰富的经验。 在过去的15年里，他一直致力于无人机系统和智能车辆技术的开发和应用，涵盖自动驾驶、态势感知、决策、验证、精准农业遥感和环境监测等领域。陈文华教授已经入选IEEE Fellow。