Congratulations to Wanxin Jin's Prelim Exam. 

Title: Inverse Optimal Control and its Applications in Human-Machine Teaming

Abstract: Finding a mission-specific objective function is the key to system autonomy under optimal control, which is  also the goal of inverse optimal control (IOC) . Namely, IOC is able to learn the unknown objective function from observation to systems' states and inputs. Applications of IOC originally stems from the motivation of explaining biological systems, and recently becomes a powerful key to achieve advanced system autonomy, such as robot apprenticeship learning, where the control objectives of a robot is learned from expert demonstrations; autonomous driving, where human driving styles are transferred to vehicle controller; human-machine collaboration, where  objectives are analyzed and predicted for efficient coordination. While significant progress has been achieved in the area of IOC, there are still major research gaps. Existing results are only limited to the situations where full observations are available, objective functions are time-invariant, or there is a centralized controller.  In this presentation for Prelim Exam, we will fill these research gap by providing IOC techniques which are applicable to situations where only partial observations are available, objective functions consist of multiple phases, and a multi-agent network without centralized coordinator is available.