Optimization
Efficient solutions to large-scale problems.
Much of MERL's research activity involves formulating scientific and engineering problems as optimizations, which can be solved in an efficient way. We have developed fundamental algorithms to better solve classic problems, such as quadratic programs and minimum-cost paths. Our work also involves developing theoretical bounds to understand performance limits.
Quick Links
-
Researchers
Stefano
Di Cairano
Toshiaki
Koike-Akino
Daniel N.
Nikovski
Arvind
Raghunathan
Ankush
Chakrabarty
Philip V.
Orlik
Rien
Quirynen
Mouhacine
Benosman
Christopher R.
Laughman
Karl
Berntorp
Kieran
Parsons
Ye
Wang
Yebin
Wang
Matthew
Brand
Petros T.
Boufounos
Scott A.
Bortoff
Devesh K.
Jha
Hassan
Mansour
Pu
(Perry)
WangJianlin
Guo
Diego
Romeres
Hongbo
Sun
Marcus
Greiff
Dehong
Liu
Abraham P.
Vinod
Avishai
Weiss
Vedang M.
Deshpande
Yanting
Ma
Hongtao
Qiao
Saviz
Mowlavi
Gordon
Wichern
William S.
Yerazunis
Jinyun
Zhang
Abraham
Goldsmith
Chungwei
Lin
Bingnan
Wang
Jing
Zhang
Wataru
Tsujita
Jose
Amaya
Anoop
Cherian
Radu
Corcodel
Joshua
Rapp
Jing
Liu
-
Awards
-
AWARD MERL Researchers Win Best Workshop Poster Award at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Date: June 2, 2023
Awarded to: Yuki Shirai, Devesh Jha, Arvind Raghunathan and Dennis Hong
MERL Contacts: Devesh K. Jha; Arvind Raghunathan
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL's paper titled: "Closed-Loop Tactile Controller for Tool Manipulation" Won the Best Poster Award in the workshop on "Embracing contacts : Making robots physically interact with our world". First author and MERL intern, Yuki Shirai, was presented with the award at a ceremony held at ICRA in London. MERL researchers Devesh Jha, Principal Research Scientist, and Arvind Raghunathan, Senior Principal Research Scientist and Senior Team Leader as well as Prof. Dennis Hong of University of California, Los Angeles are also coauthors.
The paper presents a technique to manipulate an object using a tool in a closed-loop fashion using vision-based tactile sensors. More information about the workshop and the various speakers can be found here https://sites.google.com/view/icra2023embracingcontacts/home.
- MERL's paper titled: "Closed-Loop Tactile Controller for Tool Manipulation" Won the Best Poster Award in the workshop on "Embracing contacts : Making robots physically interact with our world". First author and MERL intern, Yuki Shirai, was presented with the award at a ceremony held at ICRA in London. MERL researchers Devesh Jha, Principal Research Scientist, and Arvind Raghunathan, Senior Principal Research Scientist and Senior Team Leader as well as Prof. Dennis Hong of University of California, Los Angeles are also coauthors.
-
AWARD Arvind Raghunathan receives Roberto Tempo Best CDC Paper Award at 2022 IEEE Conference on Decision & Control (CDC) Date: December 8, 2022
Awarded to: Arvind Raghunathan
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Areas: Control, OptimizationBrief- Arvind Raghunathan, Senior Principal Research Scientist in the Data Analytics group, received the IEEE Control Systems Society Roberto Tempo Best CDC Paper Award. The award was presented at the 2022 IEEE Conference on Decision & Control (CDC).
The award is given annually in honor of Roberto Tempo, the 44th President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS). The Tempo Award Committee selects the best paper from the previous year's CDC based on originality, potential impact on any aspect of control theory, technology, or implementation, and for the clarity of writing. This year's award committee was headed by Prof. Patrizio Colaneri, Politecnico di Milano. Arvind's paper was nominated for the award by Prof. Lorenz Biegler, Carnegie Mellon University, with supporting letters from Prof. Andreas Waechter, Northwestern University, and Prof. Victor Zavala, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
- Arvind Raghunathan, Senior Principal Research Scientist in the Data Analytics group, received the IEEE Control Systems Society Roberto Tempo Best CDC Paper Award. The award was presented at the 2022 IEEE Conference on Decision & Control (CDC).
-
AWARD Outstanding Presentation Award at the 28th Conference of Information Processing Society of Japan/Consumer Device & Systems Date: October 20, 2020
Awarded to: Yukimasa Nagai, Takenori Sumi, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik, Hiroshi Mineno
MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Philip V. Orlik
Research Areas: Communications, Optimization, Signal ProcessingBrief- MELCO and MERL researchers have won "Outstanding Presentation Award" at 28th Conference of Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ)/Consumer Device & Systems held on September 29-30, 2020. The paper titled "IEEE 802.19.3 Standardization for Coexistence of IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g Systems in Sub-1 GHz Frequency Bands" reports IEEE 802.19.3 standard development on coexistence between IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g systems in the Sub-1 GHz frequency bands. MERL and MELCO have been leading this standard development and made major technical contributions, which propose methods to mitigate interference in smart meter systems. The authors are Yukimasa Nagai, Takenori Sumi, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik and Hiroshi Mineno.
See All Awards for Optimization -
-
News & Events
-
NEWS MERL presents 9 papers at 2023 IFAC World Congress Date: July 9, 2023 - July 14, 2023
MERL Contacts: Karl Berntorp; Scott A. Bortoff; Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Christopher R. Laughman; Diego Romeres; Abraham P. Vinod
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researchers presented 9 papers and organized 2 invited/workshop sessions at the 2023 IFAC World Congress held in Yokohama, JP.
MERL's contributions covered topics including decision-making for autonomous vehicles, statistical and learning-based estimation for GNSS and energy systems, impedance control for delta robots, learning for system identification of rigid body dynamics and time-varying systems, and meta-learning for deep state-space modeling using data from similar systems. The invited session (MERL co-organizer: Ankush Chakrabarty) was on the topic of “Estimation and observer design: theory and applications” and the workshop (MERL co-organizer: Karl Berntorp) was on “Gaussian Process Learning for Systems and Control”.
- MERL researchers presented 9 papers and organized 2 invited/workshop sessions at the 2023 IFAC World Congress held in Yokohama, JP.
-
NEWS Abraham Vinod gave an invited talk at the University of California Santa Cruz Date: June 8, 2023
Where: Zoom
MERL Contact: Abraham P. Vinod
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- Abraham Vinod gave an invited talk at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, the University of California Santa Cruz, titled "Motion Planning under Constraints and Uncertainty using Data and Reachability". His presentation covered recent work on fast and safe motion planners that can allow for coordination among agents, mitigate uncertainty arising from sensing limitations and simplified models, and tolerate the possibility of failures.
See All News & Events for Optimization -
-
Research Highlights
-
Internships
-
ST2025: Background Oriented Schlieren Tomography
The Computational Sensing team at MERL is seeking motivated and qualified individuals to develop algorithms that can perform background oriented Schlieren (BOS) tomography. The project goal is to utilize both analytical and learning-based architectures to enable the reconstruction of 3D air flows in an indoor setting from BOS measurements. Ideal candidates should be Ph.D. students and have solid background and publication record in any of the following, or related areas: imaging inverse problems, large-scale optimization, learning-based modeling for imaging, Schlieren tomography, physics informed neural networks. Publication of the results produced during our internships is expected. The duration of the internships is anticipated to be 3-6 months. Start date is flexible.
-
MS2012: Residual Model Learning for Building Energy Systems
MERL is looking for a highly motivated and qualified candidate to work on learning residual dynamics to augment ODE/DAE-based models of building energy systems. The ideal candidate will have a strong understanding of system identification, optimization, machine learning and/or function approximation; additional understanding of energy systems is a plus. Hands-on programming experience with numerical optimization solvers and Python is preferred; experience with Modelica/FMUs is a plus. PhD students are strongly preferred, as an expected outcome of the internship is a publication in a high-tier venue. The minimum duration of the internship is 12 weeks; start time is flexible.
-
CA1940: Autonomous vehicle planning and contro in uncertain environments
MERL is seeking a highly motivated and qualified intern to collaborate with the Control for Autonomy team in research on planning and control for autonomous vehicles in uncertain surrounding environments. The research domain includes algorithms for path planning and control in environments that are uncertain and perceived by sensing and predicted according to models and data. The ideal candidate is expected to be working towards a PhD with strong emphasis in vehicle guidance and control, and to have interest and background in as many as possible of: vehicle dynamics modeling and control, sensor uncertainty modeling, data-driven prediction, predictive control for uncertain systems, motion planning. Good programming skills in MATLAB, Python are required, knowledge of C/C++, rapid prototyping systems, automatic code generation, vehicle simulation packages (CarSim, CarMaker) or ROS are a plus. The expected start of of the internship is in the late Spring/Early Summer 2022, for a duration of 3-6 months.
See All Internships for Optimization -
-
Openings
See All Openings at MERL -
Recent Publications
- "A Virtual Testbed for Robust and Reproducible Calibration of Building Energy Simulation Models", 18th IBPSA International Conference and Exhibition Building Simulation, September 2023.BibTeX TR2023-114 PDF
- @inproceedings{Zhan2023sep,
- author = {Zhan, Sicheng and Chakrabarty, Ankush and Laughman, Christopher R. and Chong, Adrian},
- title = {A Virtual Testbed for Robust and Reproducible Calibration of Building Energy Simulation Models},
- booktitle = {18th IBPSA International Conference and Exhibition Building Simulation},
- year = 2023,
- month = sep,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-114}
- }
, - "Tailored Presolve Techniques in Branch-and-Bound Method for Fast Mixed-Integer Optimal Control Applications", Optimal Control Applications and Methods, August 2023.BibTeX TR2023-110 PDF
- @article{Quirynen2023aug2,
- author = {Quirynen, Rien and Di Cairano, Stefano},
- title = {Tailored Presolve Techniques in Branch-and-Bound Method for Fast Mixed-Integer Optimal Control Applications},
- journal = {Optimal Control Applications and Methods},
- year = 2023,
- month = aug,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-110}
- }
, - "Digital Twins for Vapor Compression Cycles: Challenges & Opportunities", International Congress of Refrigeration (ICR), August 2023.BibTeX TR2023-103 PDF
- @inproceedings{Laughman2023aug,
- author = {Laughman, Christopher R. and Deshpande, Vedang M. and Qiao, Hongtao and Bortoff, Scott A. and Chakrabarty, Ankush},
- title = {Digital Twins for Vapor Compression Cycles: Challenges & Opportunities},
- booktitle = {International Congress of Refrigeration (ICR)},
- year = 2023,
- month = aug,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-103}
- }
, - "MPC-based Pedestrian Routing for Congestion Balancing", IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA), August 2023.BibTeX TR2023-099 PDF
- @inproceedings{Menner2023aug,
- author = {Menner, Marcel and Di Cairano, Stefano and Hamada, Masaki and Gushima, Kota},
- title = {MPC-based Pedestrian Routing for Congestion Balancing},
- booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA)},
- year = 2023,
- month = aug,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-099}
- }
, - "Personalized Routing using Crowdsourced Connected Vehicle Data", IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA), August 2023.BibTeX TR2023-095 PDF
- @inproceedings{Tiwari2023aug,
- author = {Tiwari, Anuj and Berntorp, Karl and Di Cairano, Stefano and Menner, Marcel},
- title = {Personalized Routing using Crowdsourced Connected Vehicle Data},
- booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA)},
- year = 2023,
- month = aug,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-095}
- }
, - "Impedance Control of a Delta Robot", World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), July 2023.BibTeX TR2023-090 PDF
- @inproceedings{Bortoff2023jul,
- author = {Bortoff, Scott A. and Sanders, Haley and Girindhar, Deepika},
- title = {Impedance Control of a Delta Robot},
- booktitle = {World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)},
- year = 2023,
- month = jul,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-090}
- }
, - "A Generalized GraphEM for Sparse Time-Varying Dynamical Systems", World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), July 2023.BibTeX TR2023-086 PDF
- @inproceedings{Greiff2023jul2,
- author = {Greiff, Marcus and Di Cairano, Stefano and Mansour, Hassan and Berntorp, Karl},
- title = {A Generalized GraphEM for Sparse Time-Varying Dynamical Systems},
- booktitle = {World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)},
- year = 2023,
- month = jul,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-086}
- }
, - "Bandit-based multi-agent search under noisy observations", World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), July 2023.BibTeX TR2023-085 PDF
- @inproceedings{Thaker2023jul,
- author = {Thaker, Parth and Di Cairano, Stefano and Vinod, Abraham P.},
- title = {Bandit-based multi-agent search under noisy observations},
- booktitle = {World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)},
- year = 2023,
- month = jul,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2023-085}
- }
,
- "A Virtual Testbed for Robust and Reproducible Calibration of Building Energy Simulation Models", 18th IBPSA International Conference and Exhibition Building Simulation, September 2023.
-
Videos
-
Simultaneous Trajectory Optimization and Contact Selection for Multi-Modal Manipulation Planning
-
[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2023] Learning and Dynamical Systems
-
Robust Pivoting Manipulation using Contact Implicit Bilevel Optimization
-
Robot Locomotion by Automated Controller Tuning
-
Real-time Mixed-integer Programming for Vehicle Decision Making and Motion Planning
-
Optimization-based Coordination and Control of Traffic Lights and Mixed Traffic in Multi-Intersection Networks
-
[MERL Seminar Series Fall 2022] Design, Identification and Simulation of PM Synchronous Machines for Traction
-
Toshiaki Koike-Akino Gives Seminar Talk at IEEE Boston Photonics
-
[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2022] RLMPC: An Ideal Combination of Formal Optimal Control and Reinforcement Learning?
-
[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2022] Extreme optics design as a large-scale optimization problem
-
[MERL Seminar Series 2021] Integration of Analytics Techniques for Algorithmic Sports Betting
-
Multiview Sensing with Unknown Permutations: An Optimal Transport Approach
-
Imaging for inverse scattering in Reflection Tomography
-
Electric Satellite Station Keeping, Attitude Control, and Momentum Management by MPC
-
Polar Coding with Chemical Reaction Networks for Molecular Communications
-
EMI reduction in PWM inverters using adaptive frequency modulated carriers
-
Globally Optimal Power Flow
-
Five Axis Additive Manufacturing
-
Fast Pattern Search in Big Data
-
-
Downloads