This paper details the application of a constrained receding horizon control technique to stabilize an indoor vectored-thrust flight experiment, known as the Caltech Ducted Fan, subjected to step commands. The result of the experiment sheds light on the theoretical stability of the receding horizon control strategy as well as validates some efficient computation techniques for solving nonlinear...

Central to the ongoing development of practical financial risk management methods is recognition of the fact that asset return volatility is often forecastable. Although there is no single horizon relevant for financial risk management, most would agree that in many situations the relevant horizon is quite long, certainly longer than a few days. This fact creates some tension, because although ...

We address the problem of learning robot control by model-free reinforcement learning (RL). We adopt the probabilistic model of Vlassis and Toussaint (2009) for model-free RL, and we propose a Monte Carlo EM algorithm (MCEM) for control learning that searches directly in the space of controller parameters using information obtained from randomly generated robot trajectories. MCEM is related to,...

Distributed receding horizon discrete-time filtering is presented here, which combines a Kalman filter and receding horizon strategy. Distributed fusion with the weighted sum structure is then applied to local receding horizon Kalman filters (LRHKFs) having non-equal horizon time intervals. The proposed distributed algorithm has a parallel structure that allows for the parallel processing of ob...

We develop a unifying approach for approximating a \limit" zero-sum game by a sequence of approximating games. We discuss both the convergence of the values and the convergence of optimal (or \almost" optimal) strategies. Moreover, based on optimal policies for the limit game, we construct policies which are almost optimal for the approximating games. We then apply the general framework to stat...

The success of the big bang predictions for the abundances of the light elements suggests that the universe was already in thermal equilibrium at one second after the big bang. At this time, the region that later evolves to become the observed universe was, in the context of the conventional (non-inflationary) cosmological model, many horizon distances across. Try to estimate how many. You may ...

A widespread myth asserts that all small universe models suppress the CMB quadrupole. In actual fact, some models suppress the quadrupole while others elevate it, according to whether their low-order modes are weak or strong relative to their high-order modes. Elementary geometrical reasoning shows that a model’s largest dimension determines the rough value lmin at which the CMB power spectrum ...

We present in this paper several asymptotic properties of constrained Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a countable state space. We treat both the discounted and the expected average cost, with unbounded cost. We are interested in (1) the convergence of nite horizon MDPs to the innnite horizon MDP, (2) convergence of MDPs with a truncated state space to the problem with innnite state space,...

Miller and Modigliani (1961) consider valuation of innnite horizon rms that may not engage in purchasing their own shares. While their fundamental valuation approach applies also to rms that purchase their own shares, their stream of dividends approach does not. The latter approach is modiied so that it can be used for valuation of innnite horizon rms including those which may purchase their ow...