Calendar

Posted July 13, 2025
Last modified November 4, 2025

Control and Optimization Seminar Questions or comments?

Dimitra Panagou, University of Michigan AFOSR YIP, NASA Early Career Faculty, and NSF CAREER Awardee
Safety-Critical Control via Control Barrier Functions: Theory and Applications

This seminar will focus on control barrier functions, as a tool for encoding and enforcing safety specifications, as well as their recent extensions (e.g., robust, adaptive, and predictive) to handle additive perturbations, parametric uncertainty and dynamic environments, with applications to (multi)-robot/vehicle motion planning and coordination. Time permitting, we will also cover how time constraints can be encoded as fixed-time control Lyapunov functions, and the trade-offs between safety and timed convergence.

Posted July 22, 2025
Last modified November 13, 2025

Control and Optimization Seminar Questions or comments?

Javad Velni, Clemson University
Optimal Supplemental Lighting in Controlled Environment Agriculture: Data-driven and Model-based Perspectives

This seminar presents one aspect of my lab’s research focused on developing optimal supplemental lighting control strategies using LED lamps in controlled environment agriculture. The work aims to minimize electricity costs associated with supplemental lighting by integrating model-based optimization techniques with advanced machine learning methods, such as deep neural networks and Markov chains, used to predict uncertain environmental variables. Several scenarios are explored, ranging from a baseline optimal lighting approach for a single crop to more complex settings involving large-scale greenhouses with multiple crops and spatial light distribution considerations. Experimental results from a research greenhouse, where an Internet of Agricultural Things (IoAT) system was developed to grow lettuce, are presented and discussed. The seminar concludes with a roadmap highlighting several emerging research directions inspired by these findings.

Posted August 18, 2025

Control and Optimization Seminar Questions or comments?

Zequn Zheng, Louisiana State University
TBA