Prescribed Performance Control Guided Policy Improvement for Satisfying Signal Temporal Logic Tasks

Signal temporal logic (STL) provides a user-friendly interface for defining complex tasks for robotic systems. Recent efforts aim at designing control laws or using reinforcement learning methods to find policies which guarantee satisfaction of these tasks. While the former suffer from the trade-off between task specification and computational complexity, the latter encounter difficulties in exploration as the tasks become more complex and challenging to satisfy. This paper proposes to combine the benefits of the two approaches and use an efficient prescribed performance control (PPC) base law to guide exploration within the reinforcement learning algorithm. The potential of the method is demonstrated in a simulated environment through two sample navigational tasks.Comment: This is the extended version of the paper accepted to the 2019 American Control Conference (ACC), Philadelphia (to be published

Derivative-free Kalman Filter-based Control of Nonlinear Systems with Application to Transfemoral Prostheses

Derivative-free Kalman filtering (DKF) for estimation-based control of a special class of nonlinear systems is presented. The method includes a standard Kalman filter for the estimation of both states and unknown inputs, and a nonlinear system that is transformed to controllable canonical state space form through feedback linearization (FL). A direct current (DC) motor with an input torque that is a nonlinear function of the state is considered as a case study for a nonlinear single-input-single-output (SISO) system. A three degree-of-freedom (DOF) robot / prosthesis system, which includes a robot that emulates human hip and thigh motion and a powered (active) transfemoral prosthesis disturbed by ground reaction force (GRF), is considered as a case study for a nonlinear multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) system. A PD/PI control term is used to compensate for the unknown GRF. Simulation results show that FL can compensate for the system\u27s nonlinearities through a virtual control term, in contrast to Taylor series linearization, which is only a first-order linearization method. FL improves estimation performance relative to the extended Kalman filter, and in some cases improves the initial condition region of attraction as well. A stability analysis of the DKF-based control method, considering both estimation and unknown input compensation, is also presented. The error dynamics are studied in both frequency and time domains. The derivative of the unknown input plays a key role in the error dynamics and is the primary limiting factor of the closed-loop estimation-based control system stability. It is shown that in realistic systems the derivative of the unknown input is the primary determinant of the region of convergence. It is shown that the tracking error asymptotically converges to the derivative of the unknown input

IST Austria Thesis

The scalability of concurrent data structures and distributed algorithms strongly depends on reducing the contention for shared resources and the costs of synchronization and communication. We show how such cost reductions can be attained by relaxing the strict consistency conditions required by sequential implementations. In the first part of the thesis, we consider relaxation in the context of concurrent data structures. Specifically, in data structures such as priority queues, imposing strong semantics renders scalability impossible, since a correct implementation of the remove operation should return only the element with highest priority. Intuitively, attempting to invoke remove operations concurrently creates a race condition. This bottleneck can be circumvented by relaxing semantics of the affected data structure, thus allowing removal of the elements which are no longer required to have the highest priority. We prove that the randomized implementations of relaxed data structures provide provable guarantees on the priority of the removed elements even under concurrency. Additionally, we show that in some cases the relaxed data structures can be used to scale the classical algorithms which are usually implemented with the exact ones. In the second part, we study parallel variants of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm, which distribute computation among the multiple processors, thus reducing the running time. Unfortunately, in order for standard parallel SGD to succeed, each processor has to maintain a local copy of the necessary model parameter, which is identical to the local copies of other processors; the overheads from this perfect consistency in terms of communication and synchronization can negate the speedup gained by distributing the computation. We show that the consistency conditions required by SGD can be relaxed, allowing the algorithm to be more flexible in terms of tolerating quantized communication, asynchrony, or even crash faults, while its convergence remains asymptotically the same

Learning controllers from data via kernel-based interpolation

We propose a data-driven control design method for nonlinear systems that builds on kernel-based interpolation. Under some assumptions on the system dynamics, kernel-based functions are built from data and a model of the system, along with deterministic model error bounds, is determined. Then, we derive a controller design method that aims at stabilizing the closed-loop system by cancelling out the system nonlinearities. The proposed method can be implemented using semidefinite programming and returns positively invariant sets for the closed-loop system

Control of Flexible Joint Robots: A Survey

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryNational Science Foundation / NSF INT 8902476University of Illinois Manufacturing Research CenterUniversity of Illinois Research Boar

Nonlinear and sampled data control with application to power systems

Sampled data systems have come into practical importance for a variety of reasons. The earliest of these had primarily to do with economy of design. A more recent surge of interest was due to increase utilization of digital computers as controllers in feedback systems. This thesis contributes some control design for a class of nonlinear system exhibition linear output. The solution of several nonlinear control problems required the cancellation of some intrinsic dynamics (so-called zero dynamics) of the plant under feedback. It results that the so-dened control will ensure stability in closed-loop if and only if the dynamics to cancel are stable. What if those dynamics are unstable? Classical control strategies through inversion might solve the problem while making the closed loop system unstable. This thesis aims to introduce a solution for such a problem. The main idea behind our work is to stabilize the nonminimum phase system in continuous- time and undersampling using zero dynamics concept. The overall work in this thesis is divided into two parts. In Part I, we introduce a feedback control designs for the input-output stabilization and the Disturbance Decoupling problems of Single Input Single Output nonlinear systems. A case study is presented, to illustrate an engineering application of results. Part II illustrates the results obtained based on the Articial Intelligent Systems in power system machines. We note that even though the use of some of the AI techniques such as Fuzzy Logic and Neural Network does not require the computation of the model of the application, but it will still suer from some drawbacks especially regarding the implementation in practical applications. An alternative used approach is to use control techniques such as PID in the approximated linear model. This design is very well known to be used, but it does not take into account the non-linearity of the model. In fact, it seems that control design that is based on nonlinear control provide better performances