23,682 research outputs found
Path Planning for Continuum Rods Using Bernstein Surfaces
This paper presents a method for optimal motion planning of continuum robots
by employing Bernstein surfaces to approximate the system's dynamics and impose
complex constraints, including collision avoidance. The main contribution is
the approximation of infinite-dimensional continuous problems into their
discrete counterparts, facilitating their solution using standard optimization
solvers. This discretization leverages the unique properties of Bernstein
surface, providing a framework that extends previous works which focused on
ODEs approximated by Bernstein polynomials. Numerical validations are conducted
through several numerical scenarios. The presented methodology offers a
promising direction for solving complex optimal control problems in the realm
of soft robotics
Approximation and geometric modeling with simplex B-splines associated with irregular triangles
Bivariate quadratic simplical B-splines defined by their corresponding set of knots derived from a (suboptimal) constrained Delaunay triangulation of the domain are employed to obtain a C1-smooth surface. The generation of triangle vertices is adjusted to the areal distribution of the data in the domain. We emphasize here that the vertices of the triangles initially define the knots of the B-splines and do generally not coincide with the abscissae of the data. Thus, this approach is well suited to process scattered data.\ud
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With each vertex of a given triangle we associate two additional points which give rise to six configurations of five knots defining six linearly independent bivariate quadratic B-splines supported on the convex hull of the corresponding five knots.\ud
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If we consider the vertices of the triangulation as threefold knots, the bivariate quadratic B-splines turn into the well known bivariate quadratic Bernstein-BĂ©zier-form polynomials on triangles. Thus we might be led to think of B-splines as of smoothed versions of Bernstein-BĂ©zier polynomials with respect to the entire domain. From the degenerate Bernstein-BĂ©zier situation we deduce rules how to locate the additional points associated with each vertex to establish knot configurations that allow the modeling of discontinuities of the function itself or any of its directional derivatives. We find that four collinear knots out of the set of five defining an individual quadratic B-spline generate a discontinuity in the surface along the line they constitute, and that analogously three collinear knots generate a discontinuity in a first derivative.\ud
Finally, the coefficients of the linear combinations of normalized simplicial B-splines are visualized as geometric control points satisfying the convex hull property.\ud
Thus, bivariate quadratic B-splines associated with irregular triangles provide a great flexibility to approximate and model fast changing or even functions with any given discontinuities from scattered data.\ud
An example for least squares approximation with simplex splines is presented
Optimizing Memory-Bounded Controllers for Decentralized POMDPs
We present a memory-bounded optimization approach for solving
infinite-horizon decentralized POMDPs. Policies for each agent are represented
by stochastic finite state controllers. We formulate the problem of optimizing
these policies as a nonlinear program, leveraging powerful existing nonlinear
optimization techniques for solving the problem. While existing solvers only
guarantee locally optimal solutions, we show that our formulation produces
higher quality controllers than the state-of-the-art approach. We also
incorporate a shared source of randomness in the form of a correlation device
to further increase solution quality with only a limited increase in space and
time. Our experimental results show that nonlinear optimization can be used to
provide high quality, concise solutions to decentralized decision problems
under uncertainty.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Conference on Uncertainty
in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2007
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