We consider an on-line system identification setting, in which new data become available at given time steps. In order to meet real-time estimation requirements, we propose a tailored Bayesian system identification procedure, in which the hyper-parameters are still updated through Marginal Likelihood maximization, but after only one iteration of a suitable iterative optimization algorithm. Both gradient methods and the EM algorithm are considered for the Marginal Likelihood optimization. We compare this "1-step" procedure with the standard one, in which the optimization method is run until convergence to a local minimum. The experiments we perform confirm the effectiveness of the approach we propose.

Typically, forecasts are designed without knowledge of a downstream controller's task objective, and thus simply optimize formean prediction error. However, such task-agnostic representations are often too large to stream over a communication network and do not emphasize salient temporal features for cooperativecontrol.

Despite its simplicity, guaranteeing efficiency andwhether sampling theactions fromtheposterior could leadtounbounded future trajectories is unknown.

The control of uncertain systems is a long-standing problem, to which a vast body of literature is dedicated.

This paper proposes a strategy to encircle and intercept a non-cooperative aerial point-mass moving target by leveraging noisy range measurements for state estimation. In this approach, the guardians actively ensure the observability of the target by using an anti-synchronization (AS), 3D ``vibrating string" trajectory, which enables rapid position and velocity estimation based on the Kalman filter. Additionally, a novel anti-target controller is designed for the guardians to enable adaptive transitions from encircling a protected target to encircling, intercepting, and neutralizing a hostile target, taking into consideration the input constraints of the guardians. Based on the guaranteed uniform observability, the exponentially bounded stability of the state estimation error and the convergence of the encirclement error are rigorously analyzed. Simulation results and real-world UAV experiments are presented to further validate the effectiveness of the system design.

The dual challenges of prohibitive communication overhead and the impracticality of gradient computation due to data privacy or black-box constraints in distributed systems motivate this work on communication-constrained gradient-free optimization. We propose a stochastic distributed zeroth-order algorithm (Com-DSZO) requiring only two function evaluations per iteration, integrated with general compression operators. Rigorous analysis establishes its sublinear convergence rate for both smooth and nonsmooth objectives, while explicitly elucidating the compression-convergence trade-off. Furthermore, we develop a variance-reduced variant (VR-Com-DSZO) under stochastic mini-batch feedback. The empirical algorithm performance are illustrated with numerical examples.

This paper investigates the problem of consensus tracking control of discrete time multi-agent systems under binary-valued communication. Different from most existing studies on consensus tracking, the transmitted information between agents is the binary-valued. Parameter identification with binary-valued observations is applied to the estimation of neighbors'states and the tracking control is designed based on the estimation. Two Lyapunov functions are constructed to deal with the strong coupling of estimation and control. Compared with consensus problems under binary-valued communication, a reference state is required for consensus tracking control. Two scenarios of the time-varying reference state are studied respectively. (1) The reference state is asymptotically convergent. An online algorithm that performs estimation and control simultaneously is proposed, in which the estimation step size and the control gain are decreasing with time. By this algorithm, the multi-agent system is proved to achieve consensus tracking with convergence rate O(1/k^{\epsilon} ) under certain conditions. (2) The reference state is bounded, which is less conservative than that in the first case. In this case, the estimation step size and control gain are designed to be constant. By this algorithm, all the followers can reach to a neighborhood of the leader with an exponential rate. Finally, simulations are given to demonstrate theoretical results.

Regularized system identification has become a significant complement to more classical system identification. It has been numerically shown that kernel-based regularized estimators often perform better than the maximum likelihood estimator in terms of minimizing mean squared error (MSE). However, regularized estimators often require hyper-parameter estimation. This paper focuses on ridge regression and the regularized estimator by employing the empirical Bayes hyper-parameter estimator. We utilize the excess MSE to quantify the MSE difference between the empirical-Bayes-based regularized estimator and the maximum likelihood estimator for large sample sizes. We then exploit the excess MSE expressions to develop both a family of generalized Bayes estimators and a family of closed-form biased estimators. They have the same excess MSE as the empirical-Bayes-based regularized estimator but eliminate the need for hyper-parameter estimation. Moreover, we conduct numerical simulations to show that the performance of these new estimators is comparable to the empirical-Bayes-based regularized estimator, while computationally, they are more efficient.

This paper addresses the problem of task-space robust regulation of robot manipulators subject to external disturbances. A velocity-free control law is proposed by combining the internal model principle and the passivity-based output-feedback control approach. The developed output-feedback controller ensures not only asymptotic convergence of the regulation error but also suppression of unwanted external step/sinusoidal disturbances. The potential of the proposed method lies in its simplicity, intuitively appealing, and simple gain selection criteria for synthesis of multi-joint robot manipulator control systems.