23,837 research outputs found
Automatic Differentiation of Rigid Body Dynamics for Optimal Control and Estimation
Many algorithms for control, optimization and estimation in robotics depend
on derivatives of the underlying system dynamics, e.g. to compute
linearizations, sensitivities or gradient directions. However, we show that
when dealing with Rigid Body Dynamics, these derivatives are difficult to
derive analytically and to implement efficiently. To overcome this issue, we
extend the modelling tool `RobCoGen' to be compatible with Automatic
Differentiation. Additionally, we propose how to automatically obtain the
derivatives and generate highly efficient source code. We highlight the
flexibility and performance of the approach in two application examples. First,
we show a Trajectory Optimization example for the quadrupedal robot HyQ, which
employs auto-differentiation on the dynamics including a contact model. Second,
we present a hardware experiment in which a 6 DoF robotic arm avoids a randomly
moving obstacle in a go-to task by fast, dynamic replanning
High-Performance Small-Scale Solvers for Moving Horizon Estimation
In this paper we present a moving horizon estimation (MHE) formulation suitable to easily describe the quadratic programs (QPs) arising in constrained and nonlinear MHE. We propose algorithms for factorization and solution of the underlying Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) system, as well as the efficient implementation techniques focusing on small-scale problems. The proposed MHE solver is implemented using custom linear algebra routines and is compared against implementations using BLAS libraries. Additionally, the MHE solver is interfaced to a code generation tool for nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) and nonlinear MHE (NMHE). On an example problem with 33 states, 6 inputs and 15 estimation intervals execution times below 500 microseconds are reported for the QP underlying the NMHE. 1
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Development of Eco-Friendly Ramp Control for Connected and Automated Electric Vehicles
With on-board sensors such as camera, radar, and Lidar, connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) can sense the surrounding environment and be driven autonomously and safely by themselves without colliding into other objects on the road. CAVs are also able to communicate with each other and roadside infrastructure via vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, respectively, sharing information on the vehicles’ states, signal phase and timing (SPaT) information, enabling CAVs to make decisions in a collaborative manner. As a typical scenario, ramp control attracts wide attention due to the concerns of safety and mobility in the merging area. In particular, if the line-of-the-sight is blocked (because of grade separation), then neither mainline vehicles nor on-ramp vehicles may well adapt their own dynamics to perform smoothed merging maneuvers. This may lead to speed fluctuations or even shockwave propagating upstream traffic along the corridor, thus potentially increasing the traffic delays and excessive energy consumption. In this project, the research team proposed a hierarchical ramp merging system that not only allowed microscopic cooperative maneuvers for connected and automated electric vehicles on the ramp to merge into mainline traffic flow, but also had controllability of ramp inflow rate, which enabled macroscopic traffic flow control. A centralized optimal control-based approach was proposed to both smooth the merging flow and improve the system-wide mobility of the network. Linear quadratic trackers in both finite horizon and receding horizon forms were developed to solve the optimization problem in terms of path planning and sequence determination, and a microscopic electric vehicle (EV) energy consumption model was applied to estimate the energy consumption. The simulation results confirmed that under the regulated inflow rate, the proposed system was able to avoid potential traffic congestion and improve the mobility (in terms of average speed) as much as 115%, compared to the conventional ramp metering and the ramp without any control approach. Interestingly, for EVs (connected and automated EVs in this study), the improved mobility may not necessarily result in the reduction of energy consumption. The “sweet spot” of average speed ranges from 27–34 mph for the EV models in this study.View the NCST Project Webpag
Multi-time-horizon Solar Forecasting Using Recurrent Neural Network
The non-stationarity characteristic of the solar power renders traditional
point forecasting methods to be less useful due to large prediction errors.
This results in increased uncertainties in the grid operation, thereby
negatively affecting the reliability and increased cost of operation. This
research paper proposes a unified architecture for multi-time-horizon
predictions for short and long-term solar forecasting using Recurrent Neural
Networks (RNN). The paper describes an end-to-end pipeline to implement the
architecture along with the methods to test and validate the performance of the
prediction model. The results demonstrate that the proposed method based on the
unified architecture is effective for multi-horizon solar forecasting and
achieves a lower root-mean-squared prediction error compared to the previous
best-performing methods which use one model for each time-horizon. The proposed
method enables multi-horizon forecasts with real-time inputs, which have a high
potential for practical applications in the evolving smart grid.Comment: Accepted at: IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE
2018), 7 pages, 5 figures, code available: sakshi-mishra.github.i
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