NEWS    MERL researchers contribute six papers to IFAC World Congress 2026

Date:

August 23, 2026 - August 28, 2026

Where:

Busan, South Korea

Description:

MERL researchers contributed six papers to the 23rd IFAC World Congress 2026, held August 23–28 in Busan, South Korea. The IFAC World Congress, held every three years, brings together the international control community to share advances in control theory and applications.

The papers covered a range of topics in spacecraft control, autonomous robotics, and precision motion control:

- Coordinated aerial inspection of infrastructure with heterogeneous drones, using drones with complementary sensing capabilities. MERL also released an open-source ROS 2 implementation accompanying the work.

- Geostationary satellite control using averaged dynamics, with the goal of extending the time between east–west station-keeping maneuvers.

- Scenario-based model predictive control for spacecraft station keeping on a near-rectilinear halo orbit.

- Parameter estimation for induction machines, enabling torque-bound construction for trajectory planning and control in precision positioning systems.

- Feedforward control with dual neural networks, improving motion tracking when load-side position measurements are only partially available.

- Constrained sampling-based model predictive control for contact-rich robotics, combining sampling-based exploration with gradient-based refinement for safe and precise robot motion.

In addition to the paper presentations, MERL researcher Abraham Vinod delivered an invited talk at the workshop “Trustworthy Data-Driven Control: From Finite Samples to Robust Guarantees.” His talk discussed data-driven environmental monitoring and decision-making under uncertainty.

External Link:

https://ifac2026.org/

Research Areas:

Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization

• Related Publications

   Wang, C., Romeres, D., Schperberg, A., Li, N., Wang, Y., "Constrained Sampling MPC for Safe Contact-Rich Control: From Exploration to Precision via Hybrid Refinement⋆", IFAC World Congress, September 2026.

  BibTeX TR2026-119 PDF

  • @inproceedings{Wang2026sep,
  • author = {Wang, Chenghao and Romeres, Diego and Schperberg, Alexander and Li, Na and Wang, Yebin},
  • title = {{Constrained Sampling MPC for Safe Contact-Rich Control: From Exploration to Precision via Hybrid Refinement⋆}},
  • booktitle = {IFAC World Congress},
  • year = 2026,
  • month = sep,
  • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-119}
  • }

   Pavlasek, N., Acikmese, B., Di Cairano, S., Weiss, A., "Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for High-Thrust Geostationary Station Keeping using Averaged Dynamics", World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), August 2026.

  BibTeX TR2026-117 PDF

  • @inproceedings{Pavlasek2026aug,
  • author = {Pavlasek, Natalia and Acikmese, Behcet and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Weiss, Avishai},
  • title = {{Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for High-Thrust Geostationary Station Keeping using Averaged Dynamics}},
  • booktitle = {World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)},
  • year = 2026,
  • month = aug,
  • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-117}
  • }

   Folorunsho, S., Hayner, C., Di Cairano, S., Vinod, A.P., "Coordinated aerial inspection of infrastructure with heterogeneous drones", World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), July 2026.

  BibTeX TR2026-101 PDF Software

  • @inproceedings{Folorunsho2026jul,
  • author = {Folorunsho, Samuel and Hayner, Christopher and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Vinod, Abraham P.},
  • title = {{Coordinated aerial inspection of infrastructure with heterogeneous drones}},
  • booktitle = {World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)},
  • year = 2026,
  • month = jul,
  • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-101}
  • }