Vortrag von Prof. Dr. Melanie Zeilinger

Prof. Dr. Melanie Zeilinger
Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering
ETH Zurich
Zurich, Switzerland 

Friday 2024-02-02 2 p.m.
IST Seminar Room 2.255 - Pfaffenwaldring 9 - Campus Stuttgart-Vaihingen

Abstract

Model predictive control has seen widespread success in many applications for its ability to explicitly ensure satisfaction of safety constraints. Its popularity has recently re-gained traction through its potential as a flexible framework for safe learning-based control. While a variety of methods are available to address model uncertainty, the context of learning and complex systems has emphasized the need for improved uncertainty handling to reduce conservativeness while maintaining the strong guarantees of predictive control.

In this talk, I will present an overview of our recent research in the domain of soft constrained, stochastic and robust model predictive control. After discussing convergence guarantees of soft constrained formulations to address large unexpected disturbances, the focus will be on an explicit treatment of uncertainty in the constrained control problem. I will discuss the challenges of closed-loop guarantees under stochastic uncertainties and introduce the concept of indirect feedback stochastic MPC for linear systems, forming the basis for many extensions. Finally, focusing on bounded uncertainties, the talk will highlight the benefits of system level synthesis for robust MPC and address the key challenges of nonlinear systems and efficient computational methods enabling this promising approach in practice.

Biographical Information

Melanie Zeilinger is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich, where she is leading the Intelligent Control Systems. She received the diploma in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart in Germany in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich in 2011. From 2011 to 2012 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. From 2012 to 2015 she was a Postdoctoral Researcher and Marie Curie fellow in a joint program with the University of California at Berkeley, USA, and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen, Germany. From 2018 to 2019 she was a professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her awards include the ETH medal for her PhD thesis, an SNF Professorship, the Golden Owl for exceptional teaching at ETH Zurich 2022 and the European Control Award 2023. Her research interests include learning-based control with applications to robotics and human-in-the-loop control.