Welcome!
Optimization for Robotics Summer School will be held from July 14-18, 2025 at the University of Patras in Patras, Greece.
Optimization algorithms form the bedrock of much of robotics, from machine learning to control, state estimation, and simulation. However, the research literature on these topics is vast and different communities often use different notation and terminology to describe similar ideas, making it difficult to see the deep connections between these areas.
The overall goal is to provide roboticists with a deeper understanding of the connections between seemingly disparate topics and to motivate the cross-pollination of ideas across subfields. No specialized background in optimization is expected of attendees. All content will also be posted online and released as open-source after the summer school for the benefit of the robotics community.
The Optimization for Robotics Summer School will cover:
- A grounding in the fundamental mathematics and numerical algorithms of optimization.
- A selection of robotics topics, including learning, control, state estimation, and simulation, from a unified optimization perspective.
- Instructor-guided hands-on coding exercises to gain practical experience.
Targeted Attendance: 100 master students, PhD students or early career researchers/faculty
Attendee Cost:
- Registration without accommodation:
Early-bird (until April 1st 2025): €350Standard: €450Late/On-site: €500
- Travel awards and/or fee waivers will be given to selected students
See the Applicant Selection Procedure for details.
Update: We are fully booked! Thank you for your interest!
Venue & Social Events
All the activities (except for the dinner) of the summer school will happen in the Conference & Cultural Center of the University of Patras. More details about the social events and the venue can be found here.
Slides and Other Material
The lecture slides and other material (e.g. code) will be becoming available here.
Code for most of the practicals will also be available through a GitHub repository.
Schedule
Each day will consist of a mix of background on key topics, hands-on examples both in software and with select hardware deployments, and research talks from leaders in the field.
Schedule Overview
A schedule overview follows in the table. The full detailed schedule is available here.
| Day | Date | Topics | Speakers and Materials |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Monday | Optimization Background Morning Introduction to Optimization I Noon Introduction to Optimization II Afternoon Introduction to Robotics & Dynamics |
Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis
of University of Patras
Shivesh Kumar
of Chalmers University and DFKI GmbH
|
| Day 2 | Tuesday | Optimal Control Morning Trajectory Optimization and Numerical Optimal Control I Noon Versatile and Dynamic Legged Robots: From Hardware Design to Control Algorithms (Plenary Talk) Afternoon Trajectory Optimization and Numerical Optimal Control II |
Hae-Won Park (Plenary Speaker)
of Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)
|
| Day 3 | Wednesday | Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control Morning Real-Time Model-Predictive Control for Robotics Noon Introduction to Reinforcement Learning Afternoon Combining Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control |
Enrico Mingo Hoffman
of INRIA Nancy Grand-Est
Andrea Del Prete
of University of Trento
Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis
of University of Patras
|
| Day 4 | Thursday | State Estimation and Simulation Morning Differentiable Simulation for Robotics Afternoon State Estimation for Robotics |
Kostas Alexis (Plenary Speaker)
of Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Zachary Manchester
of Carnegie Mellon University
|
| Day 5 | Friday | Hands-On Sessions (Simulation and Hardware) Morning The new Human Centered Robotics team at Inria Nancy: from humanoids to exoskeletons (Plenary Talk) All day Hands-On Sessions and Deployment on Robots |
Serena Ivaldi (Plenary Speaker)
of INRIA Nancy Grand-Est
Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis
of University of Patras
Shivesh Kumar
of Chalmers University and DFKI GmbH
|
Questions?
Contact us at costashatz@upatras.gr with any questions regarding the summer school.
Supporters and Sponsors
We would like to thank IEEE RAS Technical Education Programs, Google DeepMind, euROBIN, bitcraze, the AI-Hub at the University of Patras, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, CubeMars, Versatile Robotics, and Kotronis Packaging for their support to our summer school!
Want to become a sponsor? Check how to support our summer school here.
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