A Comparison Between Coupled and Decoupled Vehicle Motion Controllers Based on Prediction Models

In this work, a comparative study is carried out with two different predictive controllers that consider the longitudinal jerk and steering rate change as additional parameters, as additional parameters, so that comfort constraints can be included. Furthermore, the approaches are designed so that the effect of longitudinal and lateral motion control coupling can be analyzed. This way, the first controller is a longitudinal and lateral coupled MPC approach based on a kinematic model of the vehicle, while the second is a decoupled strategy based on a triple integrator model based on MPC for the longitudinal control and a double proportional curvature control for the lateral motion control. The control architecture and motion planning are exhaustively explained. The comparative study is carried out using a test vehicle, whose dynamics and low-level controllers have been simulated using the realistic simulation environment Dynacar. The performed tests demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches in speeds higher than 30 km/h, and demonstrate that the coupled strategy provides better performance than the decoupled one. The relevance of this work relies in the contribution of vehicle motion controllers considering the comfort and its advantage over decoupled alternatives for future implementation in real vehicles.This work has been conducted within the ENABLE-S3 project that has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking under Grant Agreement No 692455. This work was developed at Tecnalia Research & Innovation facilities supporting this research

The palace is no fun - Disparate and diffuse ideological backgrounds of technologically augmented architectures

This master’s thesis is a comparative analysis of four case studies which represent ideologies of technologically augmented architectures. The first two case studies are an artist’s utopian vision of a city called New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuys and the prescient cybernetic plan for the Fun Palace by architect Cedric Price, both taking place in the 1960s. These projects are then juxtaposed with two smart city projects under construction at the time of writing this thesis: Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and Songdo in South Korea. The goal of this thesis is to trace the ideological backgrounds of the aforementioned case studies and to explore the ideological development of this technological mindset . How are the projects presented by their background organizations and designers? What kind of values do they claim to represent and can these values be found in the actual designs? Do contemporary smart cities put civic life first or are there other motivations behind their conception? New Babylon was to be an environment for a nomadic human existence that would consist of infinitely variable spaces with controls to alter atmospheres. Fun Palace was an enormous machinic building, with cranes and other devices making it possible for visitors to rearrange every part of the structure. Neither projects would look the same from one day to the other, but would be everchanging in nature. The projects were never realized. The former remained one artist’s single most comprehensive project spanning more than a decade. The latter did file for building permits and had hundreds of people involved in its design process but eventually never got built. Masdar City and Songdo are so-called ubiquitous cities that share many qualities. They are both cities that are not retrofits of already existing urban fabrics, but are built from the ground up. Smart grids and infrastructures embedded with digital sensors are built into the fabric of the cities from the start. Both cities claim that this will not only provide for efficiency and controllability of resources and utilites, embedded technology and computation will also substantially cut emissions and create a better functioning civic environment. The research points out a difference between stated and unstated goals of the contemporary cases compared to the historical ones. All of the cases are envisioning environments where technology is embedded into the built environment, enabling new kinds of interactions between citizen and city. In the earlier cases the goal was to create environments for the creation of a critically engaged citizen. Most notably, they would put the citizens themselves in charge of their environments. In the contemporary cases the control is put in the infrastructural systems and their operators. At the same time, the legibility of the existence of these infrastructures is obscured. The shape of urban environments remains conventional and the underlying systems that sense, compute and enact on citizens behalf disappear from citizens’ perception. These layers of infrastructure and intensions, both visible and hidden, stated and unstated, suggest that there is more than meets the eye to the technological optimism of the smart city movement. Examining past visions of technologically augmented environments offer us a point of reflection for the values at play in these kinds of developments today.Tämä maisterin opinnäytetyö on vertaileva analyysi neljästä tapauksesta, jotka edustavat teknologisesti augmentoidun rakentamisen ideologioita. Kaksi ensimmäistä ovat 1960-luvulta: taitelija Constant Nieuwenhuysin utopistinen projekti New Babylon sekä arkkitehti Cedric Price Fun Palace, kauaskatseinen aikainen kyberneettinen arkkitehtuuriprojekti. Näitä projekteja vertaillaan kahteen tätä opinnäytetyötä kirjoittaessa rakenteilla olevaan älykaupunkiprojektiin: Masdar Cityyn Abu Dhabissa sekä Songdoon Etelä-Koreassa. Tämän työn tavoite on paikantaa edellä mainittujen tapausten ideologiset lähtökohdat ja selvittää miten teknologisesti orientoituneet ajatusmallit ovat kehittyneet. Miten taustatoimijat ja suunnittelijat esittävät projektinsa? Millaisia arvoja projektit väittävät edustavansa ja onko arvot mahdollista paikantaa itse suunnitelmista? Asettavatko nykyhetken älykaupunkiprojektit kaupungin elämän ja asukkaat etusijalle vai onko taustalla toisia motivaatioita? New Babylon oli ympäristö uudenlaiselle nomadiselle kulttuurille. Se koostui loputtomasti varioitavista tiloista joiden tunnelmia ja ’atmosfääriä’ oli mahdollista muokata. Fun Palace oli valtava konemainen rakennus, jonka osia kävijät pystyivät järjestelemään uudestaan rakennukseen sisäänrakennettujen nostokurkien avulla. Kumpikaan näistä suunnitelmista ei näyttäisi päivästä toiseen samalta vaan olisi jatkuvassa muutoksen tilassa. Projekteja ei koskaan toteutettu. Ensimmäinen jäi yhden taiteilijan merkittävimmäksi projektiksi jota hän työsti yli vuosikymmenen ajan. Jälkimmäinen eteni rakennuslupahakemuksiin asti ja sen parissa työskenteli vuosien saatossa satoja ihmisiä, mutta rakennustöitä ei koskaan aloitettu. Masdar City ja Songdo ovat nk. ubiikkikaupunkeja joissa on monia yhtäläisyyksiä. Molemmat kaupungit on rakennettu puhtaalta pöydältä. Kaupunkien pohjaksi rakennetaan älykkäitä utiliteettiverkostoja joihin on sisäänrakennettu digitaaliset seurantajärjestelmät. Molemmat kaupungit väittävät, että tämä mahdollistaa paitsi kaupungin resurssien tehokkaamman käytön ja kontrolloinnin, myös päästöjen minimoinnin ja paremmin toimivan sosiaalisen kaupunkiympäristön. Tutkimustyö osoittaa, että käsiteltyjen tapausten julki tuotujen ja tuomatta jätettyjen tavoitteiden välillä on eroja. Kaikissa tapauksissa rakennettuun ympäristöön integroitujen teknologioiden uskotaan tuovan mukanaan uudenlaisia vuorovaikutuksen mahdollisuuksia kaupunkilaisten ja kaupungin välille. New Babylonissa ja Fun Palacessa tavoitteena oli luoda ympäristöjä, joissa kansalainen voisi harjoittaa kriittisyyttä ja ennen kaikkea kontrolloida ympäristöään itse. Masdar Cityssa ja Songdossa kontrolli annetaan infrastruktuureille ja niiden operoijille. Samaan aikaan infrastruktuurien luettavuus häivytetään. Urbaanin ympäristön muoto säilyy entisellään ja taustalla toimivat sensorit ja algoritmit toimivat kansalaisten havainnoinnin ulkopuolella. Nämä kerrostumat infrastruktuurien ja tarkoitusperien kerrostumat, näkyvät ja piilotetut, julkituodut ja sanomatta jätetyt, ovat merkki siitä, että älykaupunkiliikkeen teknologinen optimismi kätkee taakseen muutakin kuin tekemiään lupauksia. Menneiden teknologisten visioiden tarkastelu tarjoaa heijastuspisteen nykyhetken kehityksen arvopohjan tarkasteluun

Interactive Architecture-Interdisciplinary Design Pedagogy in Shenzhen University

Interactive architecture is deemed as a real-time narrative medium, able to reconnect and renew the relationships between participants (users) and the surroundings to help the explore the irown motivations,inspirations decisions,and outcomes.The sensor based, human-computer (machine) integrated architecture can transform and uplift people’s daily life in entirely new ways, by strategically unlocking the potentials that technological innovations bring. This paper intends to provide a platform for further research and experimentation in the realm of interactive architecture, to encourage rethinking of the relationship between human desires and responsive space (physical or intangible) through a brief introduction to interactive architecture, and to explain the original interdisciplinary teaching methods utilized in the thesis project. By reviewing conceptual and practical cases and related theories, the readers can have a primary understanding of the particular subject and may also change their way of thinking and doing architecture. As interactive architecture is still in its beginning stage, many explorations and related methodologies need to be put in a theoretical framework. Therefore, the author of this paper strongly suggests formulating a comprehensive framework in order to guide the future generation of architects for sustainable urban development

Species of (Code) spaces

As digital technologies make a powerful impact on the production of space and software mediates most of our everyday activities, we find ourselves living, working and interacting in the common ground of code and space. The environmental diffusion of computing should be considered in relation to the increasing acceleration and simultaneity of socio-spatial and economic processes, characteristic conditions of a dynamic spatial ontology that evolved during the past decades, changing the ways we inhabit, design and think about our environments. By following the gradual hybridization of space and time, this essay investigates the ways in which software and communication networks infuse space with temporal qualities, enhancing its inherent mediality with successive layers of meaning. An account of this in urban scale is the endeavour of smart cities, a fluid field of tension and negotiation between centralized managerial visions and bottom-up participation and appropriation initiatives. Finally, as spatial production becomes increasingly transdisciplinary and the digital turn reaches a certain level of maturity, the role of the architect and the architectural object changes drastically. Cedric Price famously argued that the best solution to a spatial problem is not necessarily a building, but the question is still pending – could it then be code

Agent Based Modeling and Simulation: An Informatics Perspective

The term computer simulation is related to the usage of a computational model in order to improve the understanding of a system's behavior and/or to evaluate strategies for its operation, in explanatory or predictive schemes. There are cases in which practical or ethical reasons make it impossible to realize direct observations: in these cases, the possibility of realizing 'in-machina' experiments may represent the only way to study, analyze and evaluate models of those realities. Different situations and systems are characterized by the presence of autonomous entities whose local behaviors (actions and interactions) determine the evolution of the overall system; agent-based models are particularly suited to support the definition of models of such systems, but also to support the design and implementation of simulators. Agent-Based models and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been adopted to simulate very different kinds of complex systems, from the simulation of socio-economic systems to the elaboration of scenarios for logistics optimization, from biological systems to urban planning. This paper discusses the specific aspects of this approach to modeling and simulation from the perspective of Informatics, describing the typical elements of an agent-based simulation model and the relevant research.Multi-Agent Systems, Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation

Optimized trajectory planning for Cybernetic Transportation Systems

International audienceThis paper describes the development of an optimized path planning algorithm for automated vehicles in urban environments. This path planning is developed on the basis of urban environments, where Cybernetic Transportation Systems (CTS) will operate. Our approach is mainly affected by vehicle's kinematics and physical road constraints. Based on this assumptions, computational time for path planning can be significantly reduced by creating an off-line database that already optimized all the potential trajectories in each curve the CTS can carry out. Therefore, this algorithm generates a database of smooth and continuous curves considering a big set of different intersection scenarios, taking into account the constraints of the infrastructure and the physical limitations of the vehicle. According to the real scenario, the local planner selects from the database the appropriate curves from searching for the ones that fit with the intersections defined on it. The path planning algorithm has been tested in simulation using the previous control architecture. The results obtained show path generation improvements in terms of smoothness and continuity. Finally, the proposed algorithm was compared with previous path planning algorithms for its assessment

Greencoin – educational information system for ecoinclusion and empowering urban adaptability

The SARS-CoV19 pandemic exposed a broad spectrum of challenges for modern cities, societies and the environment at large. The post-Covid transformation requires new social, ecological and educational solutions, adjusted to modern challenges, but also equipped with technological advances that allow for digital inclusion and sustainable urban development to benefit the local economy and society. Many information systems designed to enable pro-environmental behaviours are being tested or implemented worldwide, mostly in developed countries; however, most of them focus on a sectorial approach only. On the other hand, community currencies (CCs) consider social, economic, and environmental issues yet do not fully exploit the potential of the current technological advancement. Therefore, the paper describes the process of defining the theoretical framework for Greencoin as an information system designed to be a supportive tool while shaping urban adaptability and mitigating climate change, within which a CC is embedded. The 120 social currencies and information systems (IS) analysed in this research provide valuable data that is essential to shaping the framework of the Greencoin IS, to be implemented in the subsequent stages of the project. Greencoin IS aims to operate based on an application, the work resulting from studies of existing solutions, their functionalities and technological aspects, which enable social engagement and eco-inclusion. It responds to the question of how the new types of currencies and applications enriched with gamification elements can encourage residents to get involved in shaping urban resilience. This research goal is to build a future framework for Greencoin IS based on the performed systematic literature review and case studies