35,467 research outputs found
Sensor Scheduling for Energy-Efficient Target Tracking in Sensor Networks
In this paper we study the problem of tracking an object moving randomly
through a network of wireless sensors. Our objective is to devise strategies
for scheduling the sensors to optimize the tradeoff between tracking
performance and energy consumption. We cast the scheduling problem as a
Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), where the control actions
correspond to the set of sensors to activate at each time step. Using a
bottom-up approach, we consider different sensing, motion and cost models with
increasing levels of difficulty. At the first level, the sensing regions of the
different sensors do not overlap and the target is only observed within the
sensing range of an active sensor. Then, we consider sensors with overlapping
sensing range such that the tracking error, and hence the actions of the
different sensors, are tightly coupled. Finally, we consider scenarios wherein
the target locations and sensors' observations assume values on continuous
spaces. Exact solutions are generally intractable even for the simplest models
due to the dimensionality of the information and action spaces. Hence, we
devise approximate solution techniques, and in some cases derive lower bounds
on the optimal tradeoff curves. The generated scheduling policies, albeit
suboptimal, often provide close-to-optimal energy-tracking tradeoffs
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Event-Triggered Control
Event-triggered control (ETC) methods can achieve high-performance control
with a significantly lower number of samples compared to usual, time-triggered
methods. These frameworks are often based on a mathematical model of the system
and specific designs of controller and event trigger. In this paper, we show
how deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms can be leveraged to
simultaneously learn control and communication behavior from scratch, and
present a DRL approach that is particularly suitable for ETC. To our knowledge,
this is the first work to apply DRL to ETC. We validate the approach on
multiple control tasks and compare it to model-based event-triggering
frameworks. In particular, we demonstrate that it can, other than many
model-based ETC designs, be straightforwardly applied to nonlinear systems
Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited
devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within
an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness
in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost,
WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology
formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object
detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make
optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design
goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process
(MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms
and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and
compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs
Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning for Control with Stability Guarantee
Reinforcement Learning (RL) and its integration with deep learning have
achieved impressive performance in various robotic control tasks, ranging from
motion planning and navigation to end-to-end visual manipulation. However,
stability is not guaranteed in model-free RL by solely using data. From a
control-theoretic perspective, stability is the most important property for any
control system, since it is closely related to safety, robustness, and
reliability of robotic systems. In this paper, we propose an actor-critic RL
framework for control which can guarantee closed-loop stability by employing
the classic Lyapunov's method in control theory. First of all, a data-based
stability theorem is proposed for stochastic nonlinear systems modeled by
Markov decision process. Then we show that the stability condition could be
exploited as the critic in the actor-critic RL to learn a controller/policy. At
last, the effectiveness of our approach is evaluated on several well-known
3-dimensional robot control tasks and a synthetic biology gene network tracking
task in three different popular physics simulation platforms. As an empirical
evaluation on the advantage of stability, we show that the learned policies can
enable the systems to recover to the equilibrium or way-points when interfered
by uncertainties such as system parametric variations and external disturbances
to a certain extent.Comment: IEEE RA-L + IROS 202
Resilient Autonomous Control of Distributed Multi-agent Systems in Contested Environments
An autonomous and resilient controller is proposed for leader-follower
multi-agent systems under uncertainties and cyber-physical attacks. The leader
is assumed non-autonomous with a nonzero control input, which allows changing
the team behavior or mission in response to environmental changes. A resilient
learning-based control protocol is presented to find optimal solutions to the
synchronization problem in the presence of attacks and system dynamic
uncertainties. An observer-based distributed H_infinity controller is first
designed to prevent propagating the effects of attacks on sensors and actuators
throughout the network, as well as to attenuate the effect of these attacks on
the compromised agent itself. Non-homogeneous game algebraic Riccati equations
are derived to solve the H_infinity optimal synchronization problem and
off-policy reinforcement learning is utilized to learn their solution without
requiring any knowledge of the agent's dynamics. A trust-confidence based
distributed control protocol is then proposed to mitigate attacks that hijack
the entire node and attacks on communication links. A confidence value is
defined for each agent based solely on its local evidence. The proposed
resilient reinforcement learning algorithm employs the confidence value of each
agent to indicate the trustworthiness of its own information and broadcast it
to its neighbors to put weights on the data they receive from it during and
after learning. If the confidence value of an agent is low, it employs a trust
mechanism to identify compromised agents and remove the data it receives from
them from the learning process. Simulation results are provided to show the
effectiveness of the proposed approach
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