Doctoral defence: Fatemeh Rastgar "Towards Reliable Real-Time Trajectory Optimization"

On 21 June at 10:15 Fatemeh Rastgar will defend her doctoral thesis „Towards Reliable Real-Time Trajectory Optimization“ for obtaining the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Physical Engineering).

Supervisors:
Associate Professor Arun Kumar Singh, University of Tartu
Professor Alvo Aabloo, University of Tartu

Opponent:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Habil Andreas Mueller,Johannes Kepler University, Austria

Summary:
Imagine a robot that aims to go from a starting point to a final destination while it avoids obstacles. This is where motion planning comes into play. Motion planning algorithms navigate a robot reliably in cluttered environments. One way to solve a motion planning problem is through trajectory optimization approaches. Trajectory optimization can represent the high-level behaviors of robots through mathematical formulations. However, current trajectory optimization approaches have two main challenges. Firstly, their solution heavily depends on the initial guess, and they are prone to get stuck in local minima. Secondly, they face scalability limitations by increasing the number of constraints.

This thesis endeavors to tackle these challenges by introducing four innovative trajectory optimization algorithms to improve reliability, scalability, and computational efficiency.