Dr. Sorin Olaru

This talk presents the latest developments on convex liftings, a tool belonging to the class lift-and-project techniques with various applications in control engineering. According to the latest developments, this demonstrates its capability to convexify controller design, fragility analysis of existing controllers, or higher level decision making as path planning in clutter environments. The advantages are various and span from memory reduction and efficient online evaluation for piecewise affine controllers, to the reformulation of receding horizon control into bilevel optimization but can also extend to the sensitivity of piecewise affine control laws for linear discrete-time systems with state and input constraints. On the later topic, the impact of perturbations on state space partitions is shown to be efficiently evaluated and can lead to a region-free PWA control using induced fragility margins. Finally, the presentation recalls the path generation for known and congested multi-obstacle environments, simplifying path selection through corridor generation using convex lifting.

Biography:

Dr. Sorin Olaru graduated in electrical engineering from the University “Politehnica” Bucharest (UPB) in 2001 where he also obtained the M.Sc. in 2002, being awarded the EU’s Archimedes Prize. He obtained the PhD from the University Paris XI in Orsay, France in 2005, and the PhD Cum Laude from UPB in 2010. Since 2012 he is Habilitated Professor of Control Engineering at CentraleSupélec, within the University Paris-Saclay. Currently he is leading the RTE Chair on “The Digital Transformation of Electricity Networks” and is a senior member of IEEE. His research interests encompass the optimization-based control design, set-theoretic characterization of constrained dynamical systems and the resilience of networked control systems. He was the chair of the IFAC Workshop on Control Applications of Optimization held jointly with the International Conference on Discrete Equations and Applications in 2022 and will be the general chair of the Power Systems Computation Conference in 2024.