20,304 research outputs found
A survey on fractional order control techniques for unmanned aerial and ground vehicles
In recent years, numerous applications of science and engineering for modeling and control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) systems based on fractional calculus have been realized. The extra fractional order derivative terms allow to optimizing the performance of the systems. The review presented in this paper focuses on the control problems of the UAVs and UGVs that have been addressed by the fractional order techniques over the last decade
A Sequential Two-Step Algorithm for Fast Generation of Vehicle Racing Trajectories
The problem of maneuvering a vehicle through a race course in minimum time
requires computation of both longitudinal (brake and throttle) and lateral
(steering wheel) control inputs. Unfortunately, solving the resulting nonlinear
optimal control problem is typically computationally expensive and infeasible
for real-time trajectory planning. This paper presents an iterative algorithm
that divides the path generation task into two sequential subproblems that are
significantly easier to solve. Given an initial path through the race track,
the algorithm runs a forward-backward integration scheme to determine the
minimum-time longitudinal speed profile, subject to tire friction constraints.
With this fixed speed profile, the algorithm updates the vehicle's path by
solving a convex optimization problem that minimizes the resulting path
curvature while staying within track boundaries and obeying affine,
time-varying vehicle dynamics constraints. This two-step process is repeated
iteratively until the predicted lap time no longer improves. While providing no
guarantees of convergence or a globally optimal solution, the approach performs
very well when validated on the Thunderhill Raceway course in Willows, CA. The
predicted lap time converges after four to five iterations, with each iteration
over the full 4.5 km race course requiring only thirty seconds of computation
time on a laptop computer. The resulting trajectory is experimentally driven at
the race circuit with an autonomous Audi TTS test vehicle, and the resulting
lap time and racing line is comparable to both a nonlinear gradient descent
solution and a trajectory recorded from a professional racecar driver. The
experimental results indicate that the proposed method is a viable option for
online trajectory planning in the near future
Automatic Retraction and Full Cycle Operation for a Class of Airborne Wind Energy Generators
Airborne wind energy systems aim to harvest the power of winds blowing at
altitudes higher than what conventional wind turbines reach. They employ a
tethered flying structure, usually a wing, and exploit the aerodynamic lift to
produce electrical power. In the case of ground-based systems, where the
traction force on the tether is used to drive a generator on the ground, a two
phase power cycle is carried out: one phase to produce power, where the tether
is reeled out under high traction force, and a second phase where the tether is
recoiled under minimal load. The problem of controlling a tethered wing in this
second phase, the retraction phase, is addressed here, by proposing two
possible control strategies. Theoretical analyses, numerical simulations, and
experimental results are presented to show the performance of the two
approaches. Finally, the experimental results of complete autonomous power
generation cycles are reported and compared with first-principle models.Comment: This manuscript is a preprint of a paper submitted for possible
publication on the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology and is
subject to IEEE Copyright. If accepted, the copy of record will be available
at IEEEXplore library: http://ieeexplore.ieee.or
Deep Drone Racing: From Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization
Dynamically changing environments, unreliable state estimation, and operation
under severe resource constraints are fundamental challenges that limit the
deployment of small autonomous drones. We address these challenges in the
context of autonomous, vision-based drone racing in dynamic environments. A
racing drone must traverse a track with possibly moving gates at high speed. We
enable this functionality by combining the performance of a state-of-the-art
planning and control system with the perceptual awareness of a convolutional
neural network (CNN). The resulting modular system is both platform- and
domain-independent: it is trained in simulation and deployed on a physical
quadrotor without any fine-tuning. The abundance of simulated data, generated
via domain randomization, makes our system robust to changes of illumination
and gate appearance. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to
demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on the task of agile drone flight.
We extensively test the precision and robustness of our system, both in
simulation and on a physical platform, and show significant improvements over
the state of the art.Comment: Accepted as a Regular Paper to the IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Journal. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1806.0854
Deformation Control in Rest-to-Rest Motion of Mechanisms with Flexible Links
This paper develops and validates experimentally a feedback strategy for the reduction of the link deformations in rest-to-rest motion of mechanisms with flexible links, named Delayed Reference Control (DRC). The technique takes advantage of the inertial coupling between rigid-bodymotion and elasticmotion to control the undesired link deformations by shifting in time the position reference through an action reference parameter. The action reference parameter is computed on the fly based on the sensed strains by solving analytically an optimization problem. An outer control loop is closed to compute the references for the position controllers of each actuator, which can be thought of as the inner control loop. The resulting multiloop architecture of the DRC is a relevant advantage over several traditional feedback controllers: DRC can be implemented by just adding an outer control loop to standard position controllers. A validation of the proposed control strategy is provided by applying the DRC to the real-time control of a four-bar linkage
Implementation of Nonlinear Model Predictive Path-Following Control for an Industrial Robot
Many robotic applications, such as milling, gluing, or high precision
measurements, require the exact following of a pre-defined geometric path. In
this paper, we investigate the real-time feasible implementation of model
predictive path-following control for an industrial robot. We consider
constrained output path following with and without reference speed assignment.
We present results from an implementation of the proposed model predictive
path-following controller on a KUKA LWR IV robot.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures; final revised versio
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