Planning safe trajectories for nonlinear dynamical systems subject to model uncertainty and disturbances is challenging. In this work, we present a novel approach to tackle chance-constrained trajectory planning problems with nonconvex constraints, whereby obstacle avoidance chance constraints are reformulated using the signed distance function. We propose a novel sequential convex programming algorithm and prove that under a discrete time problem formulation, it is guaranteed to converge to a solution satisfying first-order optimality conditions. We demonstrate the approach on an uncertain 6 degrees of freedom spacecraft system and show that the solutions satisfy a given set of chance constraints.
Learning Markov Models Via Low-Rank Optimization
Modeling unknown systems from data is a precursor of system optimization and sequential decision making. In this paper, we focus on learning a Markov model from a single trajectory of states. Suppose that the transition model has a small rank despite having a large state space, meaning that the system admits a low-dimensional latent structure. We show that one can estimate the full transition model accurately using a trajectory of length that is proportional to the total number of states. We propose two maximum-likelihood estimation methods: a convex approach with nuclear norm regularization and a nonconvex approach with rank constraint. We explicitly derive the statistical rates of both estimators in terms of the Kullback-Leiber divergence and the [Formula: see text] error and also establish a minimax lower bound to assess the tightness of these rates. For computing the nonconvex estimator, we develop a novel DC (difference of convex function) programming algorithm that starts with the convex M-estimator and then successively refines the solution till convergence. Empirical experiments demonstrate consistent superiority of the nonconvex estimator over the convex one.
- Award ID(s):
- 2015366
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10331950
- Journal Name:
- Operations Research
- ISSN:
- 0030-364X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Publisher's Version of Record
- https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2021.2115
