MechE Colloquium: Motion Planning with Precedence Specifications via Augmented Graphs of Convex Sets
Event details
| Date | 18.11.2025 |
| Hour | 12:00 › 13:00 |
| Speaker | Prof. Tyler Summer, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at Dallas |
| Location | Online |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
Abstract: This talk will present a method for planning optimal trajectories that avoid obstacles and satisfy key-door precedence specifications expressed with a fragment of signal temporal logic. The method includes a novel exact convex partitioning of the obstacle free space that encodes connectivity among convex free space sets, key sets, and door sets. We then construct an augmented graph of convex sets that exactly encodes the key-door precedence specifications. By solving a shortest path problem in this augmented graph of convex sets, our approach provides an exact solution up to a finite parameterization of the trajectory. To illustrate the effectiveness of the approach, a method is presented to generate key-door mazes that provide challenging problem instances, along with numerical experiments to illustrate the performance of the proposed pipeline. The pipeline is faster by several orders of magnitude than recent state-of-the art methods that use general purpose temporal logic tools.
Biography: Tyler Summers is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to joining UT Dallas, he was an ETH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich from 2011 to 2015. He received a PhD degree in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. He was a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia in 2007-2008. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2021 and a Young Investigator Program award from the US Army Research Office in 2017. His research interests are in feedback control, optimization, and learning in complex dynamical networks, with applications in robotics and power networks.
Biography: Tyler Summers is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to joining UT Dallas, he was an ETH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich from 2011 to 2015. He received a PhD degree in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. He was a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia in 2007-2008. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2021 and a Young Investigator Program award from the US Army Research Office in 2017. His research interests are in feedback control, optimization, and learning in complex dynamical networks, with applications in robotics and power networks.
Practical information
- General public
- Free