8,631 research outputs found
Fast Second-order Cone Programming for Safe Mission Planning
This paper considers the problem of safe mission planning of dynamic systems
operating under uncertain environments. Much of the prior work on achieving
robust and safe control requires solving second-order cone programs (SOCP).
Unfortunately, existing general purpose SOCP methods are often infeasible for
real-time robotic tasks due to high memory and computational requirements
imposed by existing general optimization methods. The key contribution of this
paper is a fast and memory-efficient algorithm for SOCP that would enable
robust and safe mission planning on-board robots in real-time. Our algorithm
does not have any external dependency, can efficiently utilize warm start
provided in safe planning settings, and in fact leads to significant speed up
over standard optimization packages (like SDPT3) for even standard SOCP
problems. For example, for a standard quadrotor problem, our method leads to
speedup of 1000x over SDPT3 without any deterioration in the solution quality.
Our method is based on two insights: a) SOCPs can be interpreted as
optimizing a function over a polytope with infinite sides, b) a linear function
can be efficiently optimized over this polytope. We combine the above
observations with a novel utilization of Wolfe's algorithm to obtain an
efficient optimization method that can be easily implemented on small embedded
devices. In addition to the above mentioned algorithm, we also design a
two-level sensing method based on Gaussian Process for complex obstacles with
non-linear boundaries such as a cylinder
Time-optimal Coordination of Mobile Robots along Specified Paths
In this paper, we address the problem of time-optimal coordination of mobile
robots under kinodynamic constraints along specified paths. We propose a novel
approach based on time discretization that leads to a mixed-integer linear
programming (MILP) formulation. This problem can be solved using
general-purpose MILP solvers in a reasonable time, resulting in a
resolution-optimal solution. Moreover, unlike previous work found in the
literature, our formulation allows an exact linear modeling (up to the
discretization resolution) of second-order dynamic constraints. Extensive
simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Published in 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS
An advanced telerobotic system for shuttle payload changeout room processing applications
To potentially alleviate the inherent difficulties in the ground processing of the Space Shuttle and its associated payloads, a teleoperated, semi-autonomous robotic processing system for the Payload Changeout Room (PCR) is now in the conceptual stages. The complete PCR robotic system as currently conceived is described and critical design issues and the required technologies are discussed
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