7,010 research outputs found
System Level Synthesis
This article surveys the System Level Synthesis framework, which presents a
novel perspective on constrained robust and optimal controller synthesis for
linear systems. We show how SLS shifts the controller synthesis task from the
design of a controller to the design of the entire closed loop system, and
highlight the benefits of this approach in terms of scalability and
transparency. We emphasize two particular applications of SLS, namely
large-scale distributed optimal control and robust control. In the case of
distributed control, we show how SLS allows for localized controllers to be
computed, extending robust and optimal control methods to large-scale systems
under practical and realistic assumptions. In the case of robust control, we
show how SLS allows for novel design methodologies that, for the first time,
quantify the degradation in performance of a robust controller due to model
uncertainty -- such transparency is key in allowing robust control methods to
interact, in a principled way, with modern techniques from machine learning and
statistical inference. Throughout, we emphasize practical and efficient
computational solutions, and demonstrate our methods on easy to understand case
studies.Comment: To appear in Annual Reviews in Contro
On Structured Realizability and Stabilizability of Linear Systems
We study the notion of structured realizability for linear systems defined
over graphs. A stabilizable and detectable realization is structured if the
state-space matrices inherit the sparsity pattern of the adjacency matrix of
the associated graph. In this paper, we demonstrate that not every structured
transfer matrix has a structured realization and we reveal the practical
meaning of this fact. We also uncover a close connection between the structured
realizability of a plant and whether the plant can be stabilized by a
structured controller. In particular, we show that a structured stabilizing
controller can only exist when the plant admits a structured realization.
Finally, we give a parameterization of all structured stabilizing controllers
and show that they always have structured realizations
Performance-oriented model learning for data-driven MPC design
Model Predictive Control (MPC) is an enabling technology in applications
requiring controlling physical processes in an optimized way under constraints
on inputs and outputs. However, in MPC closed-loop performance is pushed to the
limits only if the plant under control is accurately modeled; otherwise, robust
architectures need to be employed, at the price of reduced performance due to
worst-case conservative assumptions. In this paper, instead of adapting the
controller to handle uncertainty, we adapt the learning procedure so that the
prediction model is selected to provide the best closed-loop performance. More
specifically, we apply for the first time the above "identification for
control" rationale to hierarchical MPC using data-driven methods and Bayesian
optimization.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS
Improving Transient Performance of Adaptive Control Architectures using Frequency-Limited System Error Dynamics
We develop an adaptive control architecture to achieve stabilization and
command following of uncertain dynamical systems with improved transient
performance. Our framework consists of a new reference system and an adaptive
controller. The proposed reference system captures a desired closed-loop
dynamical system behavior modified by a mismatch term representing the
high-frequency content between the uncertain dynamical system and this
reference system, i.e., the system error. In particular, this mismatch term
allows to limit the frequency content of the system error dynamics, which is
used to drive the adaptive controller. It is shown that this key feature of our
framework yields fast adaptation with- out incurring high-frequency
oscillations in the transient performance. We further show the effects of
design parameters on the system performance, analyze closeness of the uncertain
dynamical system to the unmodified (ideal) reference system, discuss robustness
of the proposed approach with respect to time-varying uncertainties and
disturbances, and make connections to gradient minimization and classical
control theory.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure
Vision-Based Multi-Task Manipulation for Inexpensive Robots Using End-To-End Learning from Demonstration
We propose a technique for multi-task learning from demonstration that trains
the controller of a low-cost robotic arm to accomplish several complex picking
and placing tasks, as well as non-prehensile manipulation. The controller is a
recurrent neural network using raw images as input and generating robot arm
trajectories, with the parameters shared across the tasks. The controller also
combines VAE-GAN-based reconstruction with autoregressive multimodal action
prediction. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to learn complex
manipulation tasks, such as picking up a towel, wiping an object, and
depositing the towel to its previous position, entirely from raw images with
direct behavior cloning. We show that weight sharing and reconstruction-based
regularization substantially improve generalization and robustness, and
training on multiple tasks simultaneously increases the success rate on all
tasks
Controlling services in a mobile context-aware infrastructure
Context-aware application behaviors can be described as logic rules following the Event-Control-Action (ECA) pattern. In this pattern, an Event models an occurrence of interest (e.g., a change in context); Control specifies a condition that must hold prior to the execution of the action; and an Action represents the invocation of arbitrary services. We have defined a Controlling service aiming at facilitating the dynamic configuration of ECA rule specifications by means of a mobile rule engine and a mechanism that distributes context reasoning activities to a network of context processing nodes. In this paper we present a novel context modeling approach that provides application developers and users with more appropriate means to define context information and ECA rules. Our approach makes use of ontologies to model context information and has been developed on top of web services technology
Optimal Control of Two-Player Systems with Output Feedback
In this article, we consider a fundamental decentralized optimal control
problem, which we call the two-player problem. Two subsystems are
interconnected in a nested information pattern, and output feedback controllers
must be designed for each subsystem. Several special cases of this architecture
have previously been solved, such as the state-feedback case or the case where
the dynamics of both systems are decoupled. In this paper, we present a
detailed solution to the general case. The structure of the optimal
decentralized controller is reminiscent of that of the optimal centralized
controller; each player must estimate the state of the system given their
available information and apply static control policies to these estimates to
compute the optimal controller. The previously solved cases benefit from a
separation between estimation and control which allows one to compute the
control and estimation gains separately. This feature is not present in
general, and some of the gains must be solved for simultaneously. We show that
computing the required coupled estimation and control gains amounts to solving
a small system of linear equations
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Design Space Exploration in Cyber-Physical Systems
Cyber physical systems (CPS) integrate a variety of engineering areas such as control, mechanical and computer engineering in a holistic design effort. While interdependencies between the different disciplines are key attributes of CPS design science, little is known about the impact of design decisions of the cyber part on the overall system qualities. To investigate these interdependencies, this paper proposes a simulation-based Design Space Exploration (DSE) framework that considers detailed cyber system parameters such as cache size, bus width, and voltage levels in addition to physical and control parameters of the CPS. We propose an exploration algorithm that surfs the parameter configurations in the cyber physical sub-systems, in order to approximate the Pareto-optimal design points with regards to the trade-os among the design objectives, such as energy consumption and control stability. We apply the proposed framework to a network control system for an inverted-pendulum application. The presented holistic evaluation of the identified Pareto-points reveals the presence of non-trivial trade-os, which are imposed by the control, physical, and detailed cyber parameters. For instance the identified energy and control optimal design points comprise configurations with a wide range of CPU speeds, sample times and cache configuration following non-trivial zig-zag patterns. The proposed framework could identify and manage those trade-os and, as a result, is an imperative rst step to automate the search for superior CSP configurations
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