Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Adaptive control problems arise in many engineering applications in which one needs to design feedback controllers that ensure tracking of desired reference trajectories while at the same time identify unknown parameters such as control gains. This talk will summarize the speaker's work on adaptive tracking and parameter identification, including an application to curve tracking problems in robotics. The talk will be understandable to those familiar with the basic theory of ordinary differential equations. No prerequisite background in systems and control will be needed to understand and appreciate this talk.

Adaptive control problems arise in many engineering applications in which one needs to design feedback controllers that ensure tracking of desired reference trajectories while at the same time identify unknown parameters such as control gains. This talk will summarize the speaker's work on adaptive tracking and parameter identification, including an application to curve tracking problems in robotics. The talk will be understandable to those familiar with the basic theory of ordinary differential equations. No prerequisite background in systems and control will be needed to understand and appreciate this talk.

The set of diffeomorphisms of the unit interval, or “warping functions,” plays an important role in many in functional data analysis applications. Most prominently, the problem of registering, or aligning, pairs of functions depends on solving for an element of the diffeomorphism group that, when applied to one function, optimally aligns it to the other.
The registration problem is posed as the unconstrained minimization of a cost function over the infinite dimensional diffeomorphism function space. We make use of its well-known Riemannian geometry to implement an efficient, limited memory Riemannian BFGS optimization scheme. We compare performance and results to the benchmark algorithm, Dynamic Programming, on several functional datasets. Additionally, we apply our methodology to the problem of non-parametric density estimation and compare to the benchmark performance of MATLAB’s built-in kernel density estimator ‘ksdensity’.

The most popular model for Image Denoising is without any doubt the ROF (for Rudin-OsherFatemi) model. However, since the ROF approach has some drawbacks (the stair-case effect being one of them) practitioners have been looking for alternatives. One of them is the Elastica model, relying on the minimization in an appropriate functional space of the energy functional $J$ defined by

$$ J(v)=\varepsilon \int_{\Omega} \left[ a+b\left| \nabla\cdot \frac{\nabla v}{|\nabla v|}\right|^2 \right]|\nabla v| d\mathbf{x} + \frac{1}{2}\int_{\Omega} |f-v|^2d\mathbf{x} $$

where in $J(v)$: (i) $\Omega$ is typically a rectangular region of $R^2$ and $d\mathbf{x}=dx_1dx_2$. (ii) $\varepsilon, a$ and $b$ are positive parameters. (iii) function $f$ represents the image one intends to denoise.

Minimizing functional $J$ is a non-smooth, non-convex bi-harmonic problem from Calculus of  Variations. Its numerical solution is a relatively complicated issue. However, one can achieve this task rather easily by combining operator-splitting and finite element approximations. The main goal of this lecture is to describe such a methodology and to present the results of numerical experiments which validate it.