Conservative to confident: Treating uncertainty robustly within Learning-Based Control
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Robust control maintains stability and performance for a fixed amount of model uncertainty but can be conservative since the model is not updated online. Learning-based control, on the other hand, uses data to improve the model over time but is not typically guaranteed to be robust throughout the process. This paper proposes a novel combination of both ideas: a robust Min-Max Learning-Based Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MM-LB-NMPC) algorithm. Based on an existing LB-NMPC algorithm, we present an efficient and robust extension, altering the NMPC performance objective to optimize for the worst-case scenario. The algorithm uses a simple a priori vehicle model and a learned disturbance model. Disturbances are modelled as a Gaussian Process (GP) based on experience collected during previous trials as a function of system state, input, and other relevant variables. Nominal state sequences are predicted using an Unscented Transform and worst-case scenarios are defined as sequences bounding the 3σ confidence region. Localization for the controller is provided by an on-board, vision-based mapping and navigation system enabling operation in large-scale, GPS-denied environments. The paper presents experimental results from testing on a 50 kg skid-steered robot executing a path-tracking task. The results show reductions in maximum lateral and heading path-tracking errors by up to 30% and a clear transition from robust control when the model uncertainty is high to optimal control when model uncertainty is reduced.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it