TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2025] Behçet Açıkmeşe presents talk titled Robust Trajectory Planning and Control

Date & Time:

Wednesday, June 25, 2025; 12:00 PM

Abstract:

Next-generation aerospace systems – from asteroid-mining robots and spacecraft swarms to hypersonic vehicles and urban air mobility – demand autonomy that transcends current limits. These missions require spacecraft to operate safely, efficiently, and decisively in unpredictable environments, where every decision must balance performance, resource constraints, and risk. The core challenge lies in solving complex optimal control problems in real time while: i) Exploiting full system capabilities without violating safety limits, ii) Certifying algorithmic reliability for critical Guidance, Navigation, & Control (GN&C) systems, iii) Proving robustness in the presence of uncertainty. Our solution is optimization-based control. By transforming GN&C challenges into structured optimization problems and applying methods of convexification, we achieve provably robust, computationally tractable solutions.

Speaker:

Behçet Açıkmeşe
University of Washington

Behçet Açıkmeşe is a professor at University of Washington, Seattle. He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University. Previously, he was a senior technologist at JPL and a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. At JPL, he developed flyaway control algorithms that were successfully used in the landing of Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars. His research interests include robust and nonlinear control, convex optimization and its applications control theory and its aerospace applications, and Markov decision processes. He is a recipient of many NASA and JPL achievement awards for his contributions to spacecraft control in planetary landing, formation flying, and asteroid and comet sample return missions. He is also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and IEEE CSS Award for Technical Excellence in Aerospace Control. He is a fellow of IEEE and AIAA.

MERL Host:

Avishai Weiss

Research Areas:

Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization