Strong Convex Relaxations and Tailored Conic Solvers with Applications in Robotics

May 15, 2026 · 1 min read
Dissertation title page.
project

Overview

My dissertation studies optimization methods for robotics along two connected threads: strong convex relaxations for difficult geometric and planning problems, and tailored conic solvers that exploit structure in the resulting optimization problems.

Dissertation

Strong Convex Relaxations and Tailored Conic Solvers with Applications in Robotics was submitted to the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in May 2026.

Alexandre Amice
Authors
Final Year PhD Student at MIT CSAIL/LIDS

I am a final-year PhD candidate at MIT, advised by Pablo Parrilo and Russ Tedrake, working at the intersection of mathematical optimization, robotics, and reliable autonomy. My research develops scalable algorithms for high-performance decision-making, particularly in robotics.

I am interested in the entire decision-making pipeline, from high-level modeling, high-performance solver implementations, and low-level linear algebra to enable faster optimal decisions. I specialize in semidefinite programming and sums-of-squares optimization and development of convex optimization solvers. A central theme in my work is turning mathematical structure into computation. I build algorithms that exploit polynomial, conic, and graph structure to make difficult problems tractable, and am committed to distributing robust, open-source implementations of my methods.

I wrote CCosmo, a C++ first-order conic solver family, and VEGA, a decomposition solver for Graphs of Convex Sets. I am also an active contributor to Drake’s optimization, geometry, and planning stack. I am interested in industrial research roles where rigorous optimization, scalable algorithms, and high-quality software can push the frontier of AI, robotics, autonomy, and scientific computing.