News

Prof. Dr. Matthias Gerdts from the University of the Bundeswehr Munich will give a talk as part of the MODUS Seminar on July 1, 2026, from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. in S102 (FAN-B) on the topic “Realtime trajectory optimization and model-predictive control for mobile robotics applications.”

Abstract: Automation and autonomy becomes more and more important in many applications with mobile robots. These mobile robots often do not just follow a precomputed reference path, but they need to be able to update their trajectories in order to react on changing environments. This typically requires a feedback control strategy, which takes into account the current state of the robot and the environment. To this end we employ a model-predictive control (MPC) strategy, which requires to solve (discretized) optimal control problems repeatedly. Achieving realtime capability is mandatory and often a challenge for the deployment on real systems. The talk provides an overview on techniques which can be used to reduce computational times, in particular imitation learning and problem-informed machine learning.

The talk will also focus on methods for the coordination of interacting systems, which are not necessarily cooperative. We investigate suitable solution concepts and embed them into the MPC framework. The first approach uses generalized Nash equilibrium problems, which allow to model the coordination of automated agents without using pre-defined priorities. The second approach couples scheduling tasks with optimal control and leads to a bi-level optimization formulation.

Numerical experiments and case studies will be presented to illustrate the methods.