Model predictive control (MPC) is a powerful feedback technique that is often used in data-driven robotics. The performance of data-driven MPC depends on the accuracy of the model, which often requires careful tuning. Furthermore, specifying the task with an objective function and synthesizing a feedback policy are not straightforward and typically lead to suboptimal solutions driven by trial and error. To address these challenges, we present a method to jointly optimize the data-driven system identification, task specification, and control synthesis of unknown dynamical systems. We use our method to develop AutoMPC3, a software package designed to automate and optimize data-driven MPC. Empirical evaluation on the pendulum swing-up, cart-pole swing-up, and half-cheetah running demonstrates that our method finds data-driven control policies that outperform offline reinforcement learning, without any hand-tuning.

This paper addresses the problem of generating coverage paths-that is, paths that pass within some sensor footprint of every point in an environment-for vehicles with Dubins motion constraints. We extend previous work that solves this coverage problem as a traveling salesman problem (TSP) by introducing a practical heuristic algorithm to reduce runtime while maintaining near-optimal path length. Furthermore, we show that generating an optimal coverage path is NP-hard by reducing from the Exact Cover problem, which provides justification for our algorithm's conversion of Dubins coverage instances to TSP instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the algorithm does indeed produce length paths comparable to optimal in significantly less time.