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Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to endow systems with properties such as stability and safety, and has been deployed successfully across various domains. Despite this success, model uncertainty remains a significant challenge in ensuring that model-based controllers transfer to real world systems. This paper develops a data-driven approach to robust control synthesis in the presence of model uncertainty using Control Certificate Functions (CCFs), resulting in a convex optimization based controller for achieving properties like stability and safety. An important benefit of our framework is nuanced data-dependent guarantees, which in principle can yield sample-efficient data collection approaches that need not fully determine the input-to-state relationship. This work serves as a starting point for addressing important questions at the intersection of nonlinear control theory and non-parametric learning, both theoretical and in application. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method with respect to input data in simulation with an inverted pendulum in multiple experimental settings. 

In order to certify performance and safety, feedback control requires precise characterization of sensor errors. In this paper, we provide guarantees on such feedback systems when sensors are characterized by solving a supervised learning problem. We show a uniform error bound on nonparametric kernel regression under a dynamically-achievable dense sampling scheme. This allows for a finite-time convergence rate on the sub-optimality of using the regressor in closed-loop for waypoint tracking. We demonstrate our results in simulation with simplified unmanned aerial vehicle and autonomous driving examples. 

Modern nonlinear control theory seeks to develop feedback controllers that endow systems with properties such as safety and stability. The guarantees ensured by these controllers often rely on accurate estimates of the system state for determining control actions. In practice, measurement model uncertainty can lead to error in state estimates that degrades these guarantees. In this paper, we seek to unify techniques from control theory and machine learning to synthesize controllers that achieve safety in the presence of measurement model uncertainty. We define the notion of a Measurement-Robust Control Barrier Function (MR-CBF) as a tool for determining safe control inputs when facing measurement model uncertainty. Furthermore, MR-CBFs are used to inform sampling methodologies for learning-based perception systems and quantify tolerable error in the resulting learned models. We demonstrate the efficacy of MR-CBFs in achieving safety with measurement model uncertainty on a simulated Segway system. 

While real-world decisions involve many competing objectives, algorithmic decisions are often evaluated with a single objective function. In this paper, we study algorithmic policies which explicitly trade off between a private objective (such as profit) and a public objective (such as social welfare). We analyze a natural class of policies which trace an empirical Pareto frontier based on learned scores, and focus on how such decisions can be made in noisy or data-limited regimes. Our theoretical results characterize the optimal strategies in this class, bound the Pareto errors due to inaccuracies in the scores, and show an equivalence between optimal strategies and a rich class of fairness-constrained profit-maximizing policies. We then present empirical results in two different contexts — online content recommendation and sustainable abalone fisheries — to underscore the generality of our approach to a wide range of practical decisions. Taken together, these results shed light on inherent trade-offs in using machine learning for decisions that impact social welfare. 

We demonstrate multi-frame motion deblurring for gigapixel wide-field fluorescence microscopy using fast slide scanning with coded illumination. Our method illuminates the sample with multiple pulses within each exposure, in order to introduce structured motion blur. By deconvolving this known motion sequence from the set of acquired measurements, we recover the object with up to 10× higher SNR than when illuminated with a single pulse (strobed illumination), while performing acquisition at 5× higher frame-rate than a comparable stop-and-stare method. Our coded illumination sequence is optimized to maximize the reconstruction SNR. We also derive a framework for determining when coded illumination is SNR-optimal in terms of system parameters such as source illuminance, noise, and motion stage specifications. This helps system designers to choose the ideal technique for high-throughput microscopy of very large samples.

 

While real-world decisions involve many competing objectives, algorithmic decisions are often evaluated with a single objective function. In this paper, we study algorithmic policies which explicitly trade off between a private objective (such as profit) and a public objective (such as social welfare). We analyze a natural class of policies which trace an empirical Pareto frontier based on learned scores, and focus on how such decisions can be made in noisy or data-limited regimes. Our theoretical results characterize the optimal strategies in this class, bound the Pareto errors due to inaccuracies in the scores, and show an equivalence between optimal strategies and a rich class of fairness-constrained profit-maximizing policies. We then present empirical results in two different contexts — online content recommendation and sustainable abalone fisheries — to underscore the generality of our approach to a wide range of practical decisions. Taken together, these results shed light on inherent trade-offs in using machine learning for decisions that impact social welfare.