[wenc]

> there's also not really a research problem?

This is also my suspicion. :) But to ignore optimal control altogether makes me suspect many AI researchers aren't familiar with the body of research, and many who've managed a cursory read of Wikipedia may believe that the state of the art in optimal control are LQRs and LQGs, when it's really MPC (which can be thought of as a generalization of LQRs).

Also, MPC is a model-type and optimization-algorithm agnostic paradigm, so there's plenty of ways to combine models/algorithms within its broad framework -- this is partly how many MPC researchers come up with new papers :). I think AI researchers should take a look at it in complement with RL for the problems they're trying to solve.

Thanks for the link to the paper -- I will take a look.