Teruki Kato

Teruki Kato, Ryotaro Shima, Kenji Kashima

This paper presents a strictly convex chance-constrained stochastic control framework that accounts for uncertainty in control specifications such as reference trajectories and operational constraints. By jointly optimizing control inputs and risk allocation under general (possibly non-Gaussian) uncertainties, the proposed method guarantees probabilistic constraint satisfaction while ensuring strict convexity, leading to uniqueness and continuity of the optimal solution. The formulation is further extended to nonlinear model-based control using exactly linearizable models identified through machine learning. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through model predictive control applied to a hybrid powertrain system.

Teruki Kato, Koshi Oishi, Seigo Ito

Classical proportional--integral--derivative (PID) control is widely employed in industrial applications; however, achieving higher performance often motivates the adoption of model predictive control (MPC). Although gradient-based methods are the standard for real-time optimization, sampling-based approaches have recently gained attention. In particular, model predictive path integral (MPPI) control enables gradient-free optimization and accommodates non-differentiable models and objective functions. However, directly sampling control input sequences may yield discontinuous inputs and increase the optimization dimensionality in proportion to the prediction horizon. This study proposes MPPI--PID control, which applies MPPI to optimize PID gains at each control step, thereby replacing direct high-dimensional input-sequence optimization with low-dimensional gain-space optimization. This formulation enhances sample efficiency and yields smoother inputs via the PID structure. We also provide theoretical insights, including an information-theoretic interpretation that unifies MPPI and MPPI--PID, an analysis of the effect of optimization dimensionality on sample efficiency, and a characterization of input continuity induced by the PID structure. The proposed method is evaluated on the learning-based path following of a mini forklift using a residual-learning dynamics model that integrates a physical model with a neural network. System identification is performed with real driving data. Numerical path-following experiments demonstrate that MPPI--PID improves tracking performance compared with fixed-gain PID and achieves performance comparable to conventional MPPI while significantly reducing input increments. Furthermore, the proposed method maintains favorable performance even with substantially fewer samples, demonstrating its improved sample efficiency.

Teruki Kato, Ryotaro Shima, Kenji Kashima

Deep learning is increasingly used for complex, large-scale systems where first-principles modeling is difficult. However, standard deep learning models often fail to enforce physical structure or preserve convexity in downstream control, leading to physically inconsistent predictions and discontinuous inputs owing to nonconvexity. We introduce sign constraints--sign restrictions on Jacobian entries--that unify monotonicity, positivity, and sign-definiteness; additionally, we develop model-construction methods that enforce them, together with a control-synthesis procedure. In particular, we design exactly linearizable deep models satisfying these constraints and formulate model predictive control as a convex quadratic program, which yields a unique optimizer and a Lipschitz continuous control law. On a two-tank system and a hybrid powertrain, the proposed approach improves prediction accuracy and produces smoother control inputs than existing methods.