Deep Haptic Model Predictive Control for Robot-Assisted Dressing

Robot-assisted dressing offers an opportunity to benefit the lives of many people with disabilities, such as some older adults. However, robots currently lack common sense about the physical implications of their actions on people. The physical implications of dressing are complicated by non-rigid garments, which can result in a robot indirectly applying high forces to a person's body. We present a deep recurrent model that, when given a proposed action by the robot, predicts the forces a garment will apply to a person's body. We also show that a robot can provide better dressing assistance by using this model with model predictive control. The predictions made by our model only use haptic and kinematic observations from the robot's end effector, which are readily attainable. Collecting training data from real world physical human-robot interaction can be time consuming, costly, and put people at risk. Instead, we train our predictive model using data collected in an entirely self-supervised fashion from a physics-based simulation. We evaluated our approach with a PR2 robot that attempted to pull a hospital gown onto the arms of 10 human participants. With a 0.2s prediction horizon, our controller succeeded at high rates and lowered applied force while navigating the garment around a persons fist and elbow without getting caught. Shorter prediction horizons resulted in significantly reduced performance with the sleeve catching on the participants' fists and elbows, demonstrating the value of our model's predictions. These behaviors of mitigating catches emerged from our deep predictive model and the controller objective function, which primarily penalizes high forces.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA

Model Predictive Control for Grid Scale PV and Battery

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a control technique that uses prediction data to optimize costs over a given predictive horizon. There are many papers that use this technique to optimize cost in a substantially loaded microgrid, but these techniques are not feasible for utility-scale PV+Storage facility. In this study, MPC is used to optimize the cost for a utility-scale PV+Storage facility, by adding a factor of a possible curtailment. The thesis also presents the various factors that the MPC has in that utility size grid. These factors include line losses, net yield, and curtailment

Cloud-Based Dynamic Programming for an Electric City Bus Energy Management Considering Real-Time Passenger Load Prediction

Electric city bus gains popularity in recent years for its low greenhouse gas emission, low noise level, etc. Different from a passenger car, the weight of a city bus varies significantly with different amounts of onboard passengers, which is not well studied in existing literature. This study proposes a passenger load prediction model using day-of-week, time-of-day, weather, temperatures, wind levels, and holiday information as inputs. The average model, Regression Tree, Gradient Boost Decision Tree, and Neural Networks models are compared in the passenger load prediction. The Gradient Boost Decision Tree model is selected due to its best accuracy and high stability. Given the predicted passenger load, dynamic programming algorithm determines the optimal power demand for supercapacitor and battery by optimizing the battery aging and energy usage in the cloud. Then rule extraction is conducted on dynamic programming results, and the rule is real-time loaded to onboard controllers of vehicles. The proposed cloud-based dynamic programming and rule extraction framework with the passenger load prediction shows 4% and 11% fewer bus operating costs in off-peak and peak hours, respectively. The operating cost by the proposed framework is less than 1% shy of the dynamic programming with the true passenger load information

Co-simulation setup for online model-assisted control design

For reduction of energy intensity of the building sector, effective and parsimonious use of energy resources and climate control systems is a prerequisite. Intelligent Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) can be key ingredients towards achieving this goal; the incorporation of forecast data into the decision process can help achieve improved performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. In the present paper, the potential of model-based supervisory control design algorithms for automatically designing BEMS is evaluated by performing experiments in a real building. A co-simulation setup is implemented where the thermal simulation model of the building is warmed up using past sensed data and then, given weather and occupancy forecasts, a controller is designed by solving a constrained minimization problem. A stochastic optimization algorithm is used to intelligently search the controller parameter space and identify a controller that minimizes an energy-related cost function, subject to thermal comfort constraints. A middleware solution is deployed in the building to facilitate two-way communication between the building (sensing and actuation) layer and the algorithmic layer

Smart handoff technique for internet of vehicles communication using dynamic edge-backup node

© 2020 The Authors. Published by MDPI. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9030524A vehicular adhoc network (VANET) recently emerged in the the Internet of Vehicles (IoV); it involves the computational processing of moving vehicles. Nowadays, IoV has turned into an interesting field of research as vehicles can be equipped with processors, sensors, and communication devices. IoV gives rise to handoff, which involves changing the connection points during the online communication session. This presents a major challenge for which many standardized solutions are recommended. Although there are various proposed techniques and methods to support seamless handover procedure in IoV, there are still some open research issues, such as unavoidable packet loss rate and latency. On the other hand, the emerged concept of edge mobile computing has gained crucial attention by researchers that could help in reducing computational complexities and decreasing communication delay. Hence, this paper specifically studies the handoff challenges in cluster based handoff using new concept of dynamic edge-backup node. The outcomes are evaluated and contrasted with the network mobility method, our proposed technique, and other cluster-based technologies. The results show that coherence in communication during the handoff method can be upgraded, enhanced, and improved utilizing the proposed technique.Published onlin

Architecture and Information Requirements to Assess and Predict Flight Safety Risks During Highly Autonomous Urban Flight Operations

As aviation adopts new and increasingly complex operational paradigms, vehicle types, and technologies to broaden airspace capability and efficiency, maintaining a safe system will require recognition and timely mitigation of new safety issues as they emerge and before significant consequences occur. A shift toward a more predictive risk mitigation capability becomes critical to meet this challenge. In-time safety assurance comprises monitoring, assessment, and mitigation functions that proactively reduce risk in complex operational environments where the interplay of hazards may not be known (and therefore not accounted for) during design. These functions can also help to understand and predict emergent effects caused by the increased use of automation or autonomous functions that may exhibit unexpected non-deterministic behaviors. The envisioned monitoring and assessment functions can look for precursors, anomalies, and trends (PATs) by applying model-based and data-driven methods. Outputs would then drive downstream mitigation(s) if needed to reduce risk. These mitigations may be accomplished using traditional design revision processes or via operational (and sometimes automated) mechanisms. The latter refers to the in-time aspect of the system concept. This report comprises architecture and information requirements and considerations toward enabling such a capability within the domain of low altitude highly autonomous urban flight operations. This domain may span, for example, public-use surveillance missions flown by small unmanned aircraft (e.g., infrastructure inspection, facility management, emergency response, law enforcement, and/or security) to transportation missions flown by larger aircraft that may carry passengers or deliver products. Caveat: Any stated requirements in this report should be considered initial requirements that are intended to drive research and development (R&D). These initial requirements are likely to evolve based on R&D findings, refinement of operational concepts, industry advances, and new industry or regulatory policies or standards related to safety assurance

Big Data and the Internet of Things

Advances in sensing and computing capabilities are making it possible to embed increasing computing power in small devices. This has enabled the sensing devices not just to passively capture data at very high resolution but also to take sophisticated actions in response. Combined with advances in communication, this is resulting in an ecosystem of highly interconnected devices referred to as the Internet of Things - IoT. In conjunction, the advances in machine learning have allowed building models on this ever increasing amounts of data. Consequently, devices all the way from heavy assets such as aircraft engines to wearables such as health monitors can all now not only generate massive amounts of data but can draw back on aggregate analytics to "improve" their performance over time. Big data analytics has been identified as a key enabler for the IoT. In this chapter, we discuss various avenues of the IoT where big data analytics either is already making a significant impact or is on the cusp of doing so. We also discuss social implications and areas of concern.Comment: 33 pages. draft of upcoming book chapter in Japkowicz and Stefanowski (eds.) Big Data Analysis: New algorithms for a new society, Springer Series on Studies in Big Data, to appea