Mohsen Jalaeian Farimani – Optimization Online

A particle swarm optimization with a reduced-subspace trust-region safeguard for contact-rich controller tuning

Published: 2026/10/23

Bound-constrained Optimization, Control Applications, Optimization of Simulated Systems adaptive subspace technique, contact-rich robotic assembly, controller tuning, derivative-free optimization, derivative-free policy optimization, particle swarm optimization, trust-region methods

Contact-rich robotic insertion is challenging because uncertainty in alignment, friction, and contact conditions can lead to unsuccessful assembly, excessive contact forces, and jamming. Designing a reliable controller therefore requires balancing insertion performance, robustness, and recovery from unexpected contact. In this paper, we propose PSO+TR, a derivative-free optimization (DFO) method that combines the exploratory search of … Read more

Risk-Constrained MPPI Tuning with Update-Aware MA-ES Racing

Published: 2026/10/10

Constrained Nonlinear Optimization, Optimization of Simulated Systems, Optimization of Systems modeled by PDEs chance-constrained controller tuning, derivative-free line search, evolution strategy, finite-sample validation, Model Predictive Path Integral, rank uncertainty, statistical racing

We formulate offline tuning of Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controllers as a chance-constrained black-box optimization problem and develop an update-aware framework based on Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (MA-ES). We use statistical information from noisy controller evaluations to determine when the evolutionary update is sufficiently reliable. When the recombination direction is certified, a derivative-free nonmonotone … Read more