816 research outputs found
Decentralized Hybrid Formation Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
This paper presents a decentralized hybrid supervisory control approach for a
team of unmanned helicopters that are involved in a leader-follower formation
mission. Using a polar partitioning technique, the motion dynamics of the
follower helicopters are abstracted to finite state machines. Then, a discrete
supervisor is designed in a modular way for different components of the
formation mission including reaching the formation, keeping the formation, and
collision avoidance. Furthermore, a formal technique is developed to design the
local supervisors decentralizedly, so that the team of helicopters as whole,
can cooperatively accomplish a collision-free formation task
Distributed Design for Decentralized Control using Chordal Decomposition and ADMM
We propose a distributed design method for decentralized control by
exploiting the underlying sparsity properties of the problem. Our method is
based on chordal decomposition of sparse block matrices and the alternating
direction method of multipliers (ADMM). We first apply a classical
parameterization technique to restrict the optimal decentralized control into a
convex problem that inherits the sparsity pattern of the original problem. The
parameterization relies on a notion of strongly decentralized stabilization,
and sufficient conditions are discussed to guarantee this notion. Then, chordal
decomposition allows us to decompose the convex restriction into a problem with
partially coupled constraints, and the framework of ADMM enables us to solve
the decomposed problem in a distributed fashion. Consequently, the subsystems
only need to share their model data with their direct neighbours, not needing a
central computation. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the
proposed method.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in the IEEE
Transactions on Control of Network System
Traffic Signal Optimization Using Cyclically Expanded Networks
Traditionally, the coordination of multiple traffic signals and the
traffic assignment problem in an urban street network are considered
as two separate optimization problems. However, it is easy to see
that the traffic assignment has an influence on the optimal signal
coordination and, vice versa, a change in the signal coordination
changes the optimal traffic assignment. In this paper we present a
cyclically time-expanded network and a corresponding mixed integer
linear programming formulation for simultaneously optimizing both
the coordination of traffic signals and the traffic assignment in an
urban street network. Although the new cyclically time-expanded
network provides a model of both traffic and signals close to
reality, it still has the advantage of a linear objective function.
Using this model we compute optimized signal coordinations and
traffic assignment on real-world street networks. To evaluate the
practical relevance of the computed solutions we conduct extensive
simulation experiments using two established traffic simulation
tools that reveal the advantages of our model
Privacy-Preserving Distributed Optimization via Subspace Perturbation: A General Framework
As the modern world becomes increasingly digitized and interconnected,
distributed signal processing has proven to be effective in processing its
large volume of data. However, a main challenge limiting the broad use of
distributed signal processing techniques is the issue of privacy in handling
sensitive data. To address this privacy issue, we propose a novel yet general
subspace perturbation method for privacy-preserving distributed optimization,
which allows each node to obtain the desired solution while protecting its
private data. In particular, we show that the dual variables introduced in each
distributed optimizer will not converge in a certain subspace determined by the
graph topology. Additionally, the optimization variable is ensured to converge
to the desired solution, because it is orthogonal to this non-convergent
subspace. We therefore propose to insert noise in the non-convergent subspace
through the dual variable such that the private data are protected, and the
accuracy of the desired solution is completely unaffected. Moreover, the
proposed method is shown to be secure under two widely-used adversary models:
passive and eavesdropping. Furthermore, we consider several distributed
optimizers such as ADMM and PDMM to demonstrate the general applicability of
the proposed method. Finally, we test the performance through a set of
applications. Numerical tests indicate that the proposed method is superior to
existing methods in terms of several parameters like estimated accuracy,
privacy level, communication cost and convergence rate
Combination Strategies for Semantic Role Labeling
This paper introduces and analyzes a battery of inference models for the
problem of semantic role labeling: one based on constraint satisfaction, and
several strategies that model the inference as a meta-learning problem using
discriminative classifiers. These classifiers are developed with a rich set of
novel features that encode proposition and sentence-level information. To our
knowledge, this is the first work that: (a) performs a thorough analysis of
learning-based inference models for semantic role labeling, and (b) compares
several inference strategies in this context. We evaluate the proposed
inference strategies in the framework of the CoNLL-2005 shared task using only
automatically-generated syntactic information. The extensive experimental
evaluation and analysis indicates that all the proposed inference strategies
are successful -they all outperform the current best results reported in the
CoNLL-2005 evaluation exercise- but each of the proposed approaches has its
advantages and disadvantages. Several important traits of a state-of-the-art
SRL combination strategy emerge from this analysis: (i) individual models
should be combined at the granularity of candidate arguments rather than at the
granularity of complete solutions; (ii) the best combination strategy uses an
inference model based in learning; and (iii) the learning-based inference
benefits from max-margin classifiers and global feedback
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