Frank Allgöwer
University of Stuttgart, Professor
Germany
Data-driven MPC: from linear to nonlinear systems with guarantees
While recent years have shown rapid progress of learning-based and data-driven methods to effectively utilize data for control tasks, providing rigorous theoretical guarantees for such methods is challenging and an active field of research. This talk will be about a recently developed framework for model predictive control (MPC) of unknown systems based only on input-output data which admits exactly such guarantees. The proposed approach relies on the Fundamental Lemma of Willems et al. which parametrizes trajectories of unknown linear systems using data. First, we cover MPC schemes for linear systems with a focus on theoretical guarantees for the closed loop, which can be derived even if the data are noisy. Building on these results, we then move towards the general, nonlinear case. Specifically, we present a data-driven MPC approach which updates the data used for prediction online at every time step and, thereby, stabilizes unknown nonlinear systems using only input-output data. In addition to introducing the framework and the theoretical results, we also discuss successful applications of the proposed framework in simulation and real-world experiments.
Biography of the speaker
Frank Allgöwer is director of the Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control and professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. Frank’s main interests in research and teaching are in the area of systems and control with a current emphasis on the development of new methods for data-based control, optimization-based control, networks of systems, and systems biology. He received several recognitions for his work, including the IFAC Outstanding Service Award, the IEEE CSS Distinguished Member Award, the State Teaching Award of the German state of Baden-Württemberg, and the Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Frank has been the President of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) for the years 2017-2020. He was Editor for the journal Automatica from 2001 to 2015 and is currently the editor for the Springer Lecture Notes in Control and Information Science book series and has published over 500 scientific articles. From 2012 until 2020 Frank also served a Vice-President of Germany’s most important research funding agency the German Research Foundation (DFG).
