Nondeterministic hybrid dynamical systems

This thesis is concerned with the analysis, control and identification of hybrid dynamical systems. The main focus is on a particular class of hybrid systems consisting of linear subsystems. The discrete dynamic, i.e., the change between subsystems, is unknown or nondeterministic and cannot be influenced, i.e. controlled, directly. However changes in the discrete dynamic can be detected immediately, such that the current dynamic (subsystem) is known. In order to motivate the study of hybrid systems and show the merits of hybrid control theory, an example is given. It is shown that real world systems like Anti Locking Brakes (ABS) are naturally modelled by such a class of linear hybrids systems. It is shown that purely continuous feedback is not suitable since it cannot achieve maximum braking performance. A hybrid control strategy, which overcomes this problem, is presented. For this class of linear hybrid system with unknown discrete dynamic, a framework for robust control is established. The analysis methodology developed gives a robustness radius such that the stability under parameter variations can be analysed. The controller synthesis procedure is illustrated in a practical example where the control for an active suspension of a car is designed. Optimal control for this class of hybrid system is introduced. It is shows how a control law is obtained which minimises a quadratic performance index. The synthesis procedure is stated in terms of a convex optimisation problem using linear matrix inequalities (LMI). The solution of the LMI not only returns the controller but also the performance bound. Since the proposed controller structures require knowledge of the continuous state, an observer design is proposed. It is shown that the estimation error converges quadratically while minimising the covariance of the estimation error. This is similar to the Kalman filter for discrete or continuous time systems. Further, we show that the synthesis of the observer can be cast into an LMI, which conveniently solves the synthesis problem

A Data-driven, Piecewise Linear Approach to Modeling Human Motions

Motion capture, or mocap, is a prevalent technique for capturing and analyzing human articulations. Nowadays, mocap data are becoming one of the primary sources of realistic human motions for computer animation as well as education, training, sports medicine, video games, and special effects in movies. As more and more applications rely on high-quality mocap data and huge amounts of mocap data become available, there are imperative needs for more effective and robust motion capture techniques, better ways of organizing motion databases, as well as more efficient methods to compress motion sequences. I propose a data-driven, segment-based, piecewise linear modeling approach to exploit the redundancy and local linearity exhibited by human motions and describe human motions with a small number of parameters. This approach models human motions with a collection of low-dimensional local linear models. I first segment motion sequences into subsequences, i.e. motion segments, of simple behaviors. Motion segments of similar behaviors are then grouped together and modeled with a unique local linear model. I demonstrate this approach's utility in four challenging driving problems: estimating human motions from a reduced marker set; missing marker estimation; motion retrieval; and motion compression

A New Learning Method for Piecewise Linear Regression

A new connectionist model for the solution of piecewise lin- ear regression problems is introduced; it is able to reconstruct both con- tinuous and non continuous real valued mappings starting from a finite set of possibly noisy samples. The approximating function can assume a different linear behavior in each region of an unknown polyhedral parti- tion of the input domain. The proposed learning technique combines local estimation, clustering in weight space, multicategory classification and linear regression in order to achieve the desired result. Through this approach piecewise affine solutions for general nonlinear regression problems can also be found

A New Learning Method for Piecewise Linear Regression

A new connectionist model for the solution of piecewise lin- ear regression problems is introduced; it is able to reconstruct both con- tinuous and non continuous real valued mappings starting from a finite set of possibly noisy samples. The approximating function can assume a different linear behavior in each region of an unknown polyhedral parti- tion of the input domain. The proposed learning technique combines local estimation, clustering in weight space, multicategory classification and linear regression in order to achieve the desired result. Through this approach piecewise affine solutions for general nonlinear regression problems can also be found

A new learning method for piecewise linear regression. ICANN

Abstract. A new connectionist model for the solution of piecewise linear regression problems is introduced; it is able to reconstruct both continuous and non continuous real valued mappings starting from a finite set of possibly noisy samples. The approximating function can assume a different linear behavior in each region of an unknown polyhedral partition of the input domain. The proposed learning technique combines local estimation, clustering in weight space, multicategory classification and linear regression in order to achieve the desired result. Through this approach piecewise affine solutions for general nonlinear regression problems can also be found.