Ergodic Control Sandbox

Standalone tutorials for ergodic control (previously sandbox code for "Tutorial on Ergodic Control at ICRA 2024").

This sandbox accompanies the paper Ergodic Control and Controlled Diffusion for Robot Learning: Review and Tutorial.

Authors: Max Muchen Sun, Cem Bilaloglu

Table of contents

Tutorial	Code
Introduction to Ergodic Metric	[Jupyter Notebook] [Google Colab]
Closed-Form Ergodic Control	[Jupyter Notebook] [Google Colab]
Trajectory Optimization for Ergodic Control	[Jupyter Notebook] [Google Colab]
Heat Equation Driven Area Coverage (HEDAC)	[Jupyter Notebook] [Google Colab]
Ergodic Control with Kernel Functions	[Jupyter Notebook] [Google Colab]
Kernerl Ergodic Search on Lie Groups	[Jupyter Notebook] [Google Colab]
Ergodic Metric for Point Cloud Registration	[GitHub Repo]

Copyright and License

The implementations contained herein are copyright (C) 2024 - 2025 by Muchen Sun, and are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 (or later). Please see the LICENSE for more information.

Citation

If you use the sandbox in your research, please cite:

@misc{sun2026ergodiccontrolcontrolleddiffusion,
  title={Ergodic Control and Controlled Diffusion for Robot Learning: Review and Tutorial},
  author={Max Muchen Sun and Cem Bilaloglu and Ananya Rao and Stefan Ivic and Guillaume Sartoretti and Kathleen Fitzsimons and Ian Abraham and Sylvain Calinon and Todd Murphey},
  year={2026},
  eprint={2609.13295},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.RO},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13295},
}

Contact: Max Muchen Sun (msun@u.northwestern.edu)

Lab Info: Prof. Todd D. Murphey, Interactive & Emergent Autonomy Lab / Center for Robotics and Biosystems / Northwestern University