Papers

Full actuation is commonly valued for independent position and attitude tracking. This work establishes a complementary principle: when only a position trajectory is prescribed, minimizing a positively homogeneous allocation cost selects underactuated-like behavior on a fully actuated multirotor. This cost class includes norms and power laws, including standard minimum-norm pseudoinverse allocation. We use fiberwise infimization to transport the actuator-output cost to wrench space, yielding a homogeneous infimal allocation cost. Restriction to unit zero-moment forces defines a directional landscape whose minimizing directions are independent of force magnitude. We show that aligning any fixed minimizing direction with the required world-frame force minimizes instantaneous and integrated zero-moment allocation costs. The resulting body force remains in a fixed one-dimensional subspace without transverse components. We derive an exact optimality-gap decomposition quantifying the additional cost of every other attitude trajectory and characterizing the minimum-cost class. When a disturbance or prescribed-motion change modifies the required-force direction, a fully actuated platform can immediately generate the modified force using transverse authority and reorient toward the new minimum-cost family. A structurally underactuated platform must reorient before generating that force. Thus, homogeneous allocation-cost minimization explains why optimal nominal motion can be underactuated-like, while full actuation remains valuable for disturbance rejection and transient force generation.

Diffusion and flow models provide expressive policy classes for online reinforcement learning (RL), enabling multimodal behaviors and improved performance. However, training these policies remains challenging: the critic specifies the desired policy as an unnormalized Boltzmann density but does not provide direct samples from it. Many existing methods rely on importance sampling to construct training signals, which can suffer from high variance, increasing computational cost and destabilizing training. We propose Score-Calibrated Flow (SCF), a simple and efficient algorithm for training generative models to sample from unnormalized densities without importance sampling or backpropagation through the sampling trajectory. We learn the desired flow by enforcing self-consistency, bypassing target posterior mean estimation. By jointly exploiting the prescribed target score and the structure of flow matching, we establish these self-consistency requirements as score-calibrated optimality conditions, first for the terminal density and then for the trainable velocity field. We prove that their unique solutions are, respectively, the target density and the ideal flow model that conditional flow matching (CFM) would recover if target samples were available. We formulate the velocity condition as a fixed-point equation and exploit its conditional-expectation structure to construct a stop-gradient objective for enforcing it. The resulting training procedure retains the scalable sample-interpolate-regress structure of CFM despite the absence of target samples, using endpoints generated by the current flow. For online RL, the critic gradient supplies the target score at the generated actions, yielding a direct approach to actor training. Experiments on RL benchmarks demonstrate that SCF matches or improves upon state-of-the-art generative-policy baselines, while substantially reducing training time.

Temporal logic provides designers a formal reasoning tool for specifying complex spatio-temporal behaviors and tasks for autonomous systems. Many techniques exist for control synthesis according to temporal logic specifications, spanning a large variety of systems, including robotics. However, the vast majority of implementations are limited to Boolean temporal logics. Boolean temporal logic does not have an innate mechanism for quantifying abstention, rather verdicts are either definitively True or False. Recent work demonstrates that ternary logic is a capable formalism for reasoning about robotic behaviors, with the natural ability to classify uncertainty with the Unknown literal. Ternary temporal logic is still in its infancy, with work limited to synthesis for linear systems and monitoring. This work proposes a probabilistic relaxation of ternary temporal logic that allows for value and gradient computation through the same network while retaining exact verdicts on actual data. The relaxed network can be used as an objective in gradient-based control synthesis for both offline and online robotic control applications. We demonstrate the utility of our framework with two robotic manipulator tasks, one offline and one online, involving intermediate checking and sequencing of subtasks to demonstrate the benefit of our approach in terms of correct and timely execution.

Physical human–machine interaction and other multi-agent control settings require decision-making policies that adapt online. Differential games provide a principled framework where each agent optimizes an individual objective while anticipating the other's response. The relevant solution concept in many applications is the feedback Nash equilibrium (FNE), which yields time-consistent state-feedback strategies. However, computing the FNE is demanding and becomes intractable when state and input constraints must be enforced, motivating the need for approximate methods. This paper presents a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach that approximates infinite-horizon FNE trajectories through repeated solution of finite-horizon open-loop games. An auxiliary-game formulation is introduced that selects prediction horizons and terminal costs to approximate the feedback-game optimality conditions. The approach is extended to incorporate hard constraints via a constrained open-loop game formulation. For the unconstrained setting, an analytic upper bound on the state-trajectory deviation between the MPC-induced and FNE trajectories is derived, enabling quantitative performance certification. Numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with baseline approaches from the literature.

Soft robots present significant modelling challenges due to their non-linearity, complex dynamics and potentially intricate geometries. These difficulties in accurate system identification and dynamics modelling limit their applications in precise robotics tasks. Prior modelling approaches typically suffer from trade-offs in accuracy, computational efficiency, or speed. The differentiable finite element method (FEM) offers a promising balance between these desiderata for soft robot modelling, and enables the use of gradients for efficient calibration and trajectory optimisation. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end differentiable FEM-based framework designed to streamline modelling and system identification for pneumatic soft robots, enabling the generation of reliable models for downstream tasks. The framework automates the conversion of computer-aided designs into voxelised tetrahedral viscoelastic FEM meshes that accurately represent the robot's geometry and actuation mechanism. By integrating easily acquired point cloud data with differentiable FEM, the framework achieves precise identification of material and dynamic actuation parameters using a minimal experimental setup. Additionally, the differentiable nature of the model facilitates trajectory optimisation by leveraging gradients from robot dynamics and contact interactions. We validate the framework by modelling a complex bellow-shaped pneumatic soft robot and demonstrate its efficacy in real-world motion planning tasks. Experimental results indicate high modelling accuracy, with a maximum positional error of less than 3 mm, and successful application in tasks such as path following and grasping.

Storage functions are widely used to relate a control system to a simpler model for analysis and controller design, and to quantify model mismatch when a controller is designed on one model but implemented on another. In applications, several models of the same physical process are available at different levels of refinement, while refinement relations, consisting of a storage function and an associated interface, are constructed only between neighboring levels. Thus, a direct refinement relation may be unavailable between the model used for controller design and the model used for implementation. To address this gap, we consider open control systems with internal ports for interconnection and external ports for input-output analysis. We define a category, $\mathsf{OCS}_{\mathrm{chain}}$, whose objects are open control systems and whose morphisms are finite chains of refinement relations. Using this category, we derive an output mismatch bound and a closed-loop performance result for controllers refined through a sequence of interfaces. We then define a functor that transfers refinement relations from open control systems to systems without internal ports. We also develop a network lifting result showing that, under standard interconnection compatibility conditions, subsystem storage functions can be combined to obtain refinement relations and performance bounds for composite networks. Two thermal network examples illustrate recursive controller refinement and the propagation of model mismatch along refinement chains. Simulations show that an HVAC system tracks a time-varying reference temperature with error below $0.2^\circ\mathrm{C}$ even when the controller is designed on the coarsest model and deployed on the finest model.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence-radio access network (AI-RAN) are placing large language model (LLM)-driven agents within the open RAN (O-RAN) control hierarchy. A promising deployment for this agentic AI-RAN co-locates LLM inference with physical-layer (PHY) communication processing over the same accelerated compute pool for infrastructure sharing, data locality, and low control latency. However, this co-location induces bidirectional control-compute coupling, as the agent competes with PHY processing for compute, while its reasoned gNB control actions may alter future PHY workload and hence the compute available to its next inference. To this end, this article proposes the control-compute contract, a coordination protocol linking AI-RAN workload governance with O-RAN control execution. Specifically, we first expose direct compute contention on an over-the-air (OTA) O-RAN testbed, where continuous LLM inference increases the PHY decoding time approximately eightfold. We then formulate the contract as three protocol rules with operator-requirement protection, and map it onto O-RAN and AI-RAN functions as a five-stage workflow. Afterward, an OTA-calibrated case study of simulated uplink gNB control indicates that the contract keeps the proportion of slots violating the PHY time budget below $0.9\%$, against $20.7\%$ under ungoverned co-location, while achieving faster gNB control than a fixed compute reservation benchmark. Finally, we identify several open issues and outlooks for its practical deployment.

This paper presents a nonlinear extension of Density-Driven Optimal Control (D2OC) for multi-agent spatial coverage with prescribed density distributions. Rather than assigning individual target locations, D2OC drives the collective spatial distribution of agents toward a desired density through a Wasserstein-based objective. We extend this framework to multi-step finite-horizon control for discrete-time control-affine nonlinear systems using sequential convex programming. At each control update, the nonlinear dynamics are locally linearized over the prediction horizon, yielding a strictly convex quadratic program that preserves the Wasserstein barycentric structure while directly incorporating input constraints. We further characterize the effect of constrained control deviations and nonlinear Taylor remainders on the accuracy of the local linear prediction, establishing an explicit finite-horizon error bound and a two-step specialization for receding-horizon implementation. The resulting method retains the decentralized, distribution-driven nature of D2OC while providing a computationally efficient optimization procedure for nonlinear multi-agent systems. Simulations with unicycle and quadrotor teams show coverage performance comparable to nonlinear model predictive control, while substantially reducing computation time. These results demonstrate a tractable and theoretically characterized framework for density-driven spatial coverage under nonlinear dynamics.

Status updates let a receiver track a changing process, but a sender that controls when they are sent can steer the receiver's estimate without misreporting. We study competition between two such senders with opposing preferences, who report on a binary continuous-time Markov chain using state-dependent Poisson rates under individual budgets. The receiver follows the reports through a zero-order-hold estimator only if this yields at least the long-run weighted correct-estimation utility of a prior-based default estimate. We model the interaction as a Stackelberg game in which the sender favored by this default leads, the opposing sender follows, and the receiver then selects its estimator. We characterize the pure-strategy equilibria in closed form. When the follower can obtain positive utility against a silent leader, limited state-$0$ reporting by the leader merely frees part of the follower's budget for state-$1$ reports, so every optimal leader policy is either silence or full-budget state-$0$ reporting, depending on explicit budget thresholds. A single sender with the same total budget leaves the receiver at its default utility, whereas the full-budget intervention outcome makes the receiver's participation constraint slack and strictly improves its utility. At the intervention threshold, silence and full-budget intervention yield identical sender payoffs but different receiver utilities. Numerical results illustrate these regimes and compare equilibrium performance with a receiver-optimal reporting benchmark.

This paper addresses asymptotic tracking with prescribed transient and steady-state performance for a class of uncertain high-order nonlinear systems with uncertain dynamics. The proposed controller combines a barrier-type transformation of a filtered tracking error with a robust integral of the sign of the error (RISE) mechanism, yielding a continuous and low-complexity design. The proposed method does not employ neural, fuzzy, or other global approximation structures. It is shown that all closed-loop signals remain bounded, the prescribed performance funnel is preserved for all initial conditions in the funnel, and that the tracking error converges asymptotically to zero under appropriate gain selection. The analysis provides a continuous-feedback synthesis that integrates prescribed performance control (PPC) with the RISE methodology. Simulation results on a ship-steering example illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

In this paper, a complete characterization of the stability and the boundaries of the envelopes for trajectories of the Ćuk converter is provided in the cases of time and state-dependent switching. In particular, difference equations are developed and used to compute boundaries for the system's response envelopes as well as Lyapunov functions to show the system's stability in both continuous and discontinuous regimes of operation. Each case is illustrated by multiple simulations.

Safe robot control often requires combining long-horizon performance optimization with hard state and input constraints, but existing approaches tend to address this tradeoff partially. Sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) methods such as model predictive path integral (MPPI) are effective in handling nonlinear and nonconvex environments, yet their finite-sample rollouts and unconstrained weighted-average update can return an unsafe control. Deterministic nonlinear MPC can explicitly incorporate constraints, but its real-time safety and performance depends strongly on warm starts and local convergence. Hamilton–Jacobi reachability (HJR) provides rigorous safety certificates, but offline value-function computation remains practical only for reduced-order models. We propose ReSQ-MPPI, a reachability-informed generation–refinement architecture that combines these complementary strengths. An HJR value function computed offline for a reduced-order model guides online MPPI sampling toward safe, promising trajectory candidates. The MPPI solution is then refined by a small number of sequential quadratic programming (SQP) iterations in a full-order MPC problem. A key observation is that the standard MPPI inference step is an unconstrained weighted least-squares problem; ReSQ-MPPI replaces it with a constrained MPC refinement that recovers the MPPI update when it is feasible and minimally modifies it otherwise. Simulations in cluttered navigation and autonomous racing environments demonstrate that ReSQ-MPPI improves safety and performance over standalone MPPI, MPC, and reachability-filtered sampling-based control baselines.

We report kilovolt-class vertical (011) e̱ta}-Ga2O3 Schottky diodes utilizing high-permittivity dielectric TiO2/Al2O3 field-plate for high voltage and high temperature applications. A systematic study was performed with Pt/(011) e̱ta}-Ga2O3 Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) with varied diameters from 100 {\mu}m to 300 {\mu}m, for both with and without field-plate, that revealed excellent consistency of reverse blocking performance regardless of diode area. The field-plate SBDs achieved superior breakdown voltages (3.90 - 4.16 kV) compared to the diodes without field-plate (3.06 - 3.16 kV) owing to effective edge termination. Furthermore, we explored high-temperature performance of the field-plate (011) e̱ta}-Ga2O3 diodes that revealed excellent forward conduction properties and high rectification ratio (~10^9) throughout the temperature range (25 - 150 C). At reverse bias, the field-plate diodes also exhibited kV-range breakdown voltage with no evident increase in leakage current up to the explored elevated temperature of 150 C. The low area-dependence of breakdown voltage, excellent forward transport properties, and minimal reverse leakage at both high-voltage and elevated temperature demonstrate the exciting potential of (011) e̱ta}-Ga2O3 SBDs in high-temperature power switches. Thus, our work demonstrates the strategy of advancing the performance of vertical e̱ta}-Ga2O3 SBDs by utilizing the advantageous (011) e̱ta}-Ga2O3 epilayers with low background doping, reduced killer dislocation effects, and effective field management for high-voltage and high-temperature applications.

Reservoir computing (RC) is a machine learning technique for data-driven modeling of dynamics for forecasting and control, primarily studied in computer science and physics literature with promising applications in neural network learning, physical computing, and neuroscience. Why reservoirs learn and how to choose good reservoir architectures are considered important open questions. We show that the RC problem is mathematically an extension of a classic problem in systems and control theory, the Kazantzis-Kravaris-Luenberger (KKL) observer design problem. As a consequence, many of the questions considered open for RC stand to benefit from a large body of theory in the mature KKL literature, non-exhaustively including on questions of embedding, transverse stability, local and global uniqueness guarantees, and effective data-driven solution constructions. Elaborating on this connection, we show that the surprising forecasting ability of reservoirs is in fact a direct consequence of the well-known observer internal model principle, derive an upper bound on the prediction error over a fixed forecast horizon, and provide a partial explanation for why linear readout training in RC works reasonably well. This work illustrates how classical ideas from systems and control can provide strong theoretical backing and open new questions for modern machine learning methods.

This paper studies intrinsic path following for fully actuated rigid-body attitude dynamics over a broad class of attitude paths, namely arbitrary smooth embedded closed curves on $\mathsf{SO}(3)$. We construct a tangential–transverse state decomposition on a tubular neighborhood using normal and pullback bundle geometry. The resulting second-order dynamics admit a smooth feedback transformation that independently assigns tangential and transverse covariant accelerations. A transverse proportional–derivative law renders the path-following manifold invariant and locally uniformly exponentially stable on an explicit forward-invariant neighborhood, while leaving the tangential dynamics freely assignable. This allows independent regulation of progression along the path, stabilization of a selected attitude on the path, or tracking of a time-varying motion. For a representative fiber path, the tubular coordinates are obtained in closed form up to the natural cut-locus obstruction, and simulations illustrate point stabilization and trajectory tracking.

Machine Learning (ML) methods promise a fast solution process for Optimal Power Flow (OPF). While inconsistent test cases, implementations, and evaluation metrics across existing studies make it challenging to determine which algorithmic advances are most critical for real-world deployment. To this end, we propose ML-OPF-Bench, a unified benchmark for AC- and DC-OPF that evaluates representative ML algorithms under a consistent pipeline, stress-tests them across system sizes, distribution shifts, and resource budgets, and ranks them with a multi-objective framework. We find that prediction accuracy alone is not a reliable indicator of operational feasibility. Under heavily loaded, congested conditions, even the strongest in-distribution performers lose their advantage, while feasibility is maintained largely by post-processing that enforces the target constraints rather than by the underlying pure ML predictor. Data scaling shows that prediction accuracy and constraint violations follow different trajectories, whereas compute scaling shows that returns diminish and that larger models do not consistently perform better. These results expose critical trade-offs among ML methods' speed, accuracy, and feasibility, and offer practical guidance for future ML-OPF design. We open-source the benchmark as an extensible Python package for integrating new learning-based OPF algorithms and evaluating them under the same standard as the existing baselines.

Latent safety filters certify safety on a learned low-dimensional representation of the state, enabling constraints that resist analytic description. Because the encoder is lossy, a filter can report safe while the physical state is unsafe, with no detectable model error. Existing transfer conditions leave the effect of discarded safety information implicit. We ask when a lossy encoder admits a safety certificate that transfers to the physical system, and show the answer is governed by the detectability of the discarded safety-relevant dynamics. We construct a system whose latent model is exact and whose latent signals always report safe, while the physical state becomes arbitrarily unsafe. For this system no certificate exists and no monitor downstream of the encoder can detect the failure. When the discarded dynamics contract, a latent barrier certifies true safety up to two explicit margins, one for the latent-model error and one for the variation of safety across states the encoder cannot distinguish. In the linear case and under boundedness and non-degeneracy conditions, every calibrated barrier transfers with a finite margin when the safety-relevant subspace is detectable, and none does otherwise. On learned cartpole encoders, the model error does not indicate for which representations the estimated bound is non-vacuous, while the second margin does.

We pose stealthy attack scheduling on a sensor-to-estimator link under a resource constraint with a budget \bar{\Gamma} on the fraction of corrupted transmissions and a model-free whiteness constraint on the received innovations. For a discrete-time linear plant with non-Gaussian noise, the worst attack, innovation sign flip, preserves the innovation magnitude and is exactly stealthy against every magnitude-measurable detector, the damage-optimal schedule being a memoryless threshold; but the tail concentration that maximizes damage also manufactures serial correlation, where an innovation-whiteness monitor gains power. We dualize the whiteness constraint and show the optimum is a threshold rule on corrected innovation energy using memory of recent magnitudes and the previous decision. We further trace that correction to a second degree of freedom and set the damage by the location of the firing set in magnitude space and set exposure by the boundary density of its run structure. We realize it as a hysteresis set by one split-conformal order statistic without any plant model, using one counter and two comparisons per step. It keeps 80–96% of the memoryless damage at 2.3 to 71 times lower lag-one whiteness power, validated on a real truck CAN record.

This paper presents a conformal-seeded hybrid strategy for solving inverse kinematics of offset, redundant 7-DoF robot arms of the humanoid class. Analytical inverse kinematics (AIK) provides closed-form solutions with very low computational cost. However, for offset kinematic structures, the exact closed-form solution is generally unavailable, and practical AIK must rely on an approximate or simplified kinematic model. In contrast, numerical inverse kinematics (NIK) can achieve high-precision solutions on the full kinematic model. However, its convergence is highly sensitive to initialization. To overcome these limitations, we propose a two-stage hybrid inverse kinematics framework with conformal-calibrated seed selection. First, an approximate analytical model efficiently enumerates a finite set of candidate joint solutions. Second, we rank these candidates using a lightweight learned predictor of post-refinement difficulty, wrapped by split-conformal prediction into a calibrated upper bound that serves as the selection score. The best-ranked seed is then refined using a Levenberg-Marquardt solver on the full kinematic model. The proposed method combines fast candidate generation, learned seed ranking with a calibrated difficulty bound, and accurate numerical refinement, achieving real-time performance of less than 40us and a success rate of 100% in our evaluation on reachable targets. We validate the approach through large-scale stochastic simulation across the workspace and experimental demonstrations with motion planning on a humanoid robot arm. Demonstration videos are available at https://youtu.be/aeiBmw1XRbw.

The clinical management of chronic disease is naturally structured as a feedback control problem. Physicians observe the disease state at clinic visits and make decisions based on the patient's history and current state. We propose a framework that models the dynamics of chronic disease in response to therapy as an event-based controlled stochastic system, in which treatment decisions are made at discrete, irregularly spaced events while the disease evolves between events as a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) with state and input dependent transition rates. We demonstrate this framework in the setting of ulcerative colitis, where we identify the model from real-world clinical data in the electronic health record (EHR) of more than 3,000 patients with ulcerative colitis. Using the learned model, we formulate therapy selection as a model predictive control problem (MPC) that maximizes the expected time spent in inactive disease states, and we evaluate the resulting policy. In closed-loop simulation on 10 patients, the MPC achieves a cost at or below the observed clinical course in the majority of its realizations for 4 of the 10 patients, and its outcomes in all cases are comparable to observed care and within clinical guidelines.

Life support equipment coupled to the human lungs forms a complex, nonlinear dynamic system. Current respiratory mask test standards rely on sinusoidal breathing machines and surrogate trachea geometries that substantially reduce physiologically relevant airway inertance. This paper shows that the ISO 16900-5 trachea does not generate physiologically meaningful exhalation momentum, limiting the ability of standard test configurations to reveal valve dynamics relevant to human use. A physiologically motivated “lip-nozzle” surrogate is introduced as a diagnostic tool to restore realistic momentum transfer, enabling observation of exhalation behavior that is not observable under existing test conditions. Nonlinear dynamic simulations incorporating this surrogate reveal a force-balanced operating regime in which exhalation-jet momentum can offset flow-induced valve resistance, in one representative case reversing exhalation mean effective pressure from resistive to assistive. This effect depends on the relationship between the valve's restoring force and lift, representing a design consideration relevant to future valve development. Implications for mask design, valve placement, and future test methods are discussed. This work does not propose new performance limits or acceptance criteria; rather, it demonstrates how current test fixtures suppress inertance- and momentum-driven effects that can materially influence exhalation valve dynamics.

Decentralized Gaussian process (GP) methods provide a scalable framework for multi-agent scalar-field estimation by allowing each agent to maintain a local GP over its assigned subdomain. Because neighboring agents condition their GP models on different measurements, their GP posteriors generally disagree over overlapping regions. This paper introduces the inducing points decentralized Gaussian process (IPD-GP) framework, which exploits these discrepancies to improve posterior consistency over shared regions. Each sender constructs receiver-specific data packets by selecting inducing locations targeted at the pairwise overlap and transmitting the corresponding posterior means and variances. Each receiver then selectively assimilates informative packets as persistent fictitious measurements in its local GP. The developed architecture preserves decentralized computation and communication without requiring full dataset exchange or centralized inference. Performance is evaluated using normalized root-mean-square error, negative log predictive density, and their overlap-restricted counterparts, with comparisons against non-communicating local GPs, decentralized aggregation methods, and a centralized GP. Simulation results show that IPD-GP achieves competitive predictive accuracy while reducing inter-agent communication.

Concurrent learning (CL) has recently been extended to Lyapunov-based deep neural networks (DNNs) to obtain parameter convergence under finite rather than persistent excitation. However, the existing first-order law converges slowly, especially for high-dimensional systems and overparameterized networks. To address this problem, this paper develops a Nesterov-accelerated concurrent learning (NACL) adaptation law for uncertain second-order control-affine systems. The developed law drives momentum dynamics with recorded state-input data, so that all hidden layers of the DNN are updated online under a verifiable finite excitation condition. A dynamic state-derivative observer is designed to reconstruct the recorded input without acceleration measurements. The momentum variable introducesa cross term coupling the momentum lag error to the state-dependent DNN Jacobian and the tracking error, and a state-dependent normalization is introduced into the momentum filter to dominate it. A Lyapunov-based analysis establishes exponential convergence of the tracking, momentum, observer, and weight estimation errors to a bounded residual ball. Simulations on a six- degree-of-freedom unmanned underwater vehicle demonstrate a 24.5% and 62.9% reduction in the root-mean-square function approximation error relative to first-order CL and to a higher-order tuner without CL, respectively.

Multi-pass underfill dispensing couples cycle time with process reliability because the sequence determines the inter-pass flow times. This paper formulates a tri-objective multiset-permutation routing model that minimises nominal cycle time and additive duration variance while maximising reliability under hard- and soft-dwell policies; reliability combines pass, schedule-dependent flow and travel terms. Under independent durations and deterministic dwell thresholds, the variance measure equals the cycle-time variance under soft dwell and bounds it from above under hard dwell. A multiset-permutation binary-addition-tree algorithm enumerates the feasible routes without duplication and prunes prefixes by dominance. Six instances, including three BeagleBone Black benchmarks, yield reference Pareto fronts, the largest search space of $1.47 \times 10^{12}$ routes in 38 minutes on 20 CPU cores. Among simulated candidates, the nominally cost-selected routes incur maximum estimated excess costs of USD 0.0014 per board at the modelled duration variability and USD 0.0035 with it doubled. Round-robin dispatch is within 3.7 % of the reference optimum at the tested costs; NSGA-II and simplified swarm optimisation show at most 0.53 % observed cost regret while recovering about 30 % of the largest hard-dwell front. The framework quantifies sequencing trade-offs and heuristic decision regret; physical reliability prediction requires inspection-based calibration.

Transmission-line fault classification is a time-critical protection function, and recent machine-learning methods classify fault type directly from voltage and current measurements. The input to such a classifier can be supplied as sampled-value windows of raw measurements, which preserve sub-cycle structure, or as phasor-domain sequence components, which are physically interpretable but require a causal one-cycle observation window before a phasor estimate is available. This paper measures the cost of that observation window, the price of a cycle, through a controlled comparison of the two representations for streaming fault-family classification on the standard synchronous WSCC/IEEE 9-bus system. The comparison holds the simulated system, the measured channels, the eleven-class event-family taxonomy, the training procedure, and the streaming decision layer constant, and uses six configurations: 40- and 80-sample sampled-value inputs and one-cycle phasor inputs, each evaluated with a multilayer perceptron (MLP) and a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN). All six configurations classify every event successfully, yet the sampled-value representation reaches the correct class earlier in every model pair. The 40-sample sampled-value MLP attains the strongest result, with 99.34% fault-window accuracy, 99.79% normal accuracy, a 0.21% false-fault rate, a 0.65% false-normal rate, and a 2.81 ms mean first-correct delay, and it Pareto-dominates the other five configurations. A matched-window comparison at eighty samples confirms that the timing advantage follows from the representation rather than from the window length. On this clean synchronous benchmark, the one-cycle phasor representation does not return an accuracy or stability benefit sufficient to offset its delay.

We study federated reinforcement learning in which multiple agents interact with a common Markov decision process and communicate through a central server to collaboratively learn the optimal state-action value function. Our goal is to understand whether the sample-efficiency benefits of collaboration can be retained when a fraction of the agents behave adversarially and transmit arbitrarily corrupted information. To address this problem, we introduce Robust Async-Fed-Q, an epoch-based federated learning algorithm that combines variance-reduced estimation of the Bellman optimality operator at the agents with robust aggregation at the server. We establish high-probability finite-time guarantees showing that the proposed method preserves the statistical gains of collaboration among the honest agents while tolerating adversarial corruption. In particular, the effect of the adversarial agents decreases as the amount of data collected by each honest agent grows and eventually vanishes in the infinite-sample limit. We complement these guarantees with information-theoretic lower bounds that characterize the unavoidable statistical cost of adversarial corruption, leading to the first nearly matching upper and lower bounds for adversarially robust federated reinforcement learning. We further extend our framework to accommodate single-trajectory Markovian sampling and heterogeneous partial coverage, where different agents may explore different regions of the state-action space and learning relies on their collective coverage. Finally, our epoch-based design substantially improves the best known communication complexity for federated Q-learning under asynchronous sampling.

Open electromagnetic-transient datasets are beginning to make reproducible learning-based protection studies possible, but the practical use of these datasets still requires application-level benchmarks that define timing, sensing, and validation assumptions. This paper presents an initial application benchmark on the recently released PROTECT-90 dataset for two protection-oriented tasks: fault-type classification and discrete faulted-line identification. A compact one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) is evaluated using post-inception windows of 0.25, 0.5, 1, and 2 cycles under strict episode-wise splitting. A non-convolutional multilayer perceptron (MLP) is also trained as an architecture-control baseline. The results show that both tasks are nearly saturated under full observability, with one-cycle test accuracies of 99.84% for fault type and 100.00% for line identification. The main performance variation appears under reduced observability: current-only inputs preserve line identification accuracy at 100.00%, whereas voltage-only inputs reduce line identification accuracy to 53.09% with the CNN and 50.57% with the MLP. This indicates that the limiting factor is measurement information rather than neural architecture. Additional stratified checks show stable performance across topology states and fault-resistance bins, while CPU inference contributes only 0.528 ms to the one-cycle total decision time of 20.53 ms.

Per-target labeled random-finite-set filters, such as the state of the art $\delta$-generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli filter, cannot represent cooperating, swarm-like, motion between targets. In this work, we present a new filter that can. The new particle filter couples the joint particle filter with ensemble Gaussian mixture filter such that a measurement updates the density at every particle instead of merely reweighting. We prove that the new particle filter converges to the joint particle filter in the limit of particle number and thus to the true Bayesian posterior, under certain assumptions. Experimental results on two coupled systems, the Vicsek model and coupled Brownian motion provide evidence on the efficacy of the filter.

We study evolutionary Nash equilibrium learning in large populations whose payoffs are generated by dynamic mechanisms. Counterclockwise dissipativity (CCW) provides a passivity-like framework for establishing learning/convergence under a broad convex cone of so-called well-behaved learning rules satisfying a natural payoff-alignment condition according to which, away from equilibria, the population's state (strategic profile) moves in a direction positively correlated with the payoffs. The cone is closed under conic combinations and encompasses a broad range of noise-free rules, including discontinuous rules such as best response, imitative rules such as the replicator rule that is not $\delta$-passive, and all noise-free $\delta$-passive rules. Existing CCW results require no knowledge of the particular rule, but establish convergence without providing a Lyapunov function or Lyapunov stability. We develop a methodology that closes this gap by constructing rule-independent Lyapunov functions from CCW storage functions of the payoff mechanism. For a nonlinear class of anticipatory mechanisms, in which agents compare current payoffs with those associated with a smoothed population state, we show that a storage can be derived as a Bregman divergence. The resulting Lyapunov function combines a potential gap with this divergence and establishes global asymptotic stability. A congestion game with a nonlinear congestion-growth toll illustrates the results.

We consider steady-state optimization of nonlinear dynamical systems under time-varying stochastic operating conditions, where the objective is an expected-value function over the current operating-condition distribution, so that changes in the distribution induce a moving stochastic optimum. To address this problem, we propose stochastic sequential feedback optimization (S2FO), which combines projected feedback-gradient updates with sequential sensitivity estimates obtained by linearizing the plant at realized stochastic operating conditions. We analyze the closed-loop performance of S2FO through expected dynamic regret, instantaneous tracking in expectation, and almost-sure convergence under diminishing step sizes. We then apply the method to wind farm power maximization under time-varying stochastic inflow. Simulations on a benchmark layout and on a realistic offshore wind farm show that S2FO improves average power generation when persistent wake interactions are present, and that its advantage decreases as wind-direction variability increases.