Back to Departmental Colloquium: Spring 2026
Departmental Colloquium
Date: Thursday, Mar 19, 2026
Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM
Location: LCB 215
Melkior Ornik
University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign
Title |
Control of Partially Unknown Systems: Capabilities and Fundamental Limits of Knowledge |
Abstract |
The ability of a system to correctly respond to sudden adversity is critical for high-level autonomy in complex, novel, or remote environments. By assuming continuing structural knowledge about the system, classical methods of adaptive or robust control largely attempt to design control laws which enable the system to complete its original task even after an adverse event. However, catastrophic events such as physical system damage may render the original task impossible to complete. In other words, any control law that attempts to complete the task is doomed to fail. Instead, a high-level planner should understand which tasks can be certifiably completed given the current knowledge, and then formulate appropriate control laws. To this end, in this talk I will present an emergent twin effort of design-time resilience and mission-time guaranteed performance. Combining methods of reachability analysis, optimal control, and switched systems, these approaches compute a set of certifiably completable tasks consistent with the planner’s partial knowledge, estimate the time and resources necessary to complete them, and synthesize appropriate long-term plans and low-level control laws using online learning and adaptation. In describing this framework, this talk will briefly present several applications to autonomous vehicles across domains, identifying promising future directions of research such as resilience of high-level tasks, reachability with safety and state constraints, and data-driven incremental certification. |
Computational Mathematics
Applied Mathematics
Data Science and Machine Learning