Call for Contribution

On behalf of the organizers, we invite your contributions to the ICRA 2019 workshop "Toward Online Optimal Control of Dynamic Robots". This workshop will bring together leaders across theory, algorithms, and applications of optimal control & estimation to review recent advances and chart next steps forward for the community. As part of the program, we invite extended abstract submissions (up to 2 pages) to be featured in our poster session.

The organizers welcome submissions from all stages of the research process, from work in progress to journal-ready results. In particular, we encourage participation from early-stage PhD students and aim to provide an opportunity to present in a supportive environment.

Abstract Submissions
external pagehttps://easychair.org/my/conference.cgi?conf=icra19wsoptimalcontr

Important Dates
Deadline for submission of extended abstracts: April 1st, 2019
Notification of acceptance: April 15th, 2019
Workshop: May 24th, 2019

Website
http://www.rsl.ethz.ch/ocdb2019

Organizers
Farbod Farshidian
Justin Carpentier
Patrick M. Wensing
Eiichi Yoshida

Abstract
As robots are dispatched into the real world, they are faced with a need to autonomously generate goal-driven movements tailored to the (often uncertain) environment at hand. Optimal control & estimation methods have gained broad interest to address this challenge as they (1) provide a principled framework supported by well established and proven theory to architect goal-directed behaviors through parsimonious specifications, (2) exhibit strong generalizability in comparison to model-free techniques, and (3) admit transcription into numerically solvable optimization problems. When applied online, the solution of these problems has historically been limited to systems with a modest number of degrees of freedom due to computational demands and sensitivity challenges. However, in recent years, a combination of efficient numerical techniques and carefully-structured formulations have begun to show promise for the viability of online application with more complex systems.

These online solutions will have an impact across robotics, from new paradigms for generating whole-body motion of humanoids and quadrupeds, to enabling reactive control of complex contact interactions in locomotion and grasping. This workshop will bring together leaders across theory, algorithms, and applications of optimal control & estimation to review recent advances and chart next steps forward for the community.