MCU

RAYA: Learning Where and When to Intervene for Robot Recovery

We present RAYA, a hybrid learned-analytic framework that places a learned finite-horizon recoverability margin inside an optimal controller with hard constraints and pairs it with a bounded learned scheduler that shifts task weights to facilitate recovery. Across 7,200 simulation episodes per controller spanning quadrotor and autonomous-vehicle benchmarks, RAYA not only improves survival rates, but also transfers the learned components zero-shot to unseen trajectories, disturbances, plant shifts, and friction layouts. We developed an embedded realization of RAYA and deployed it on-board a 35g Crazyflie quadrotor. Across 40 combined hardware flights under wind with either aerodynamic mismatch or an unmodeled 40% motor-command loss, each of three baselines fails in all trials, while RAYA completes 10/10 six-cycle missions.

Optimizing at All Scales: Edge (Non)linear Model Predictive Control from MCUs to GPUs

In our recent works, by leveraging a combination of parallelism, approximation, and structure exploitation, we have enabled and accelerated (nonlinear) trajectory optimization solvers for real-time performance on non-standard computational hardware, ranging from microcontrollers (MCUs) to graphical processing units (GPUs). This has led to real-time MPC onboard an MCU powered 27g quadrotor for dynamic obstacle avoidance, as well as simulated whole-body nonlinear MPC at kHz rates for a GPU powered manipulator for high speed trajectory tracking.