3,947 research outputs found
Semidefinite Relaxations for Stochastic Optimal Control Policies
Recent results in the study of the Hamilton Jacobi Bellman (HJB) equation
have led to the discovery of a formulation of the value function as a linear
Partial Differential Equation (PDE) for stochastic nonlinear systems with a
mild constraint on their disturbances. This has yielded promising directions
for research in the planning and control of nonlinear systems. This work
proposes a new method obtaining approximate solutions to these linear
stochastic optimal control (SOC) problems. A candidate polynomial with variable
coefficients is proposed as the solution to the SOC problem. A Sum of Squares
(SOS) relaxation is then taken to the partial differential constraints, leading
to a hierarchy of semidefinite relaxations with improving sub-optimality gap.
The resulting approximate solutions are shown to be guaranteed over- and
under-approximations for the optimal value function.Comment: Preprint. Accepted to American Controls Conference (ACC) 2014 in
Portland, Oregon. 7 pages, colo
UAV as a Reliable Wingman: A Flight Demonstration
In this brief, we present the results from a flight experiment demonstrating two significant advances in software enabled control: optimization-based control using real-time trajectory generation and logical programming environments for formal analysis of control software. Our demonstration platform consisted of a human-piloted F-15 jet flying together with an autonomous T-33 jet. We describe the behavior of the system in two scenarios. In the first, nominal state communications were present and the autonomous aircraft maintained formation as the human pilot flew maneuvers. In the second, we imposed the loss of high-rate communications and demonstrated an autonomous safe “lost wingman” procedure to increase separation and reacquire contact. The flight demonstration included both a nominal formation flight component and an execution of the lost wingman scenario
Differential Dynamic Programming for time-delayed systems
Trajectory optimization considers the problem of deciding how to control a
dynamical system to move along a trajectory which minimizes some cost function.
Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) is an optimal control method which
utilizes a second-order approximation of the problem to find the control. It is
fast enough to allow real-time control and has been shown to work well for
trajectory optimization in robotic systems. Here we extend classic DDP to
systems with multiple time-delays in the state. Being able to find optimal
trajectories for time-delayed systems with DDP opens up the possibility to use
richer models for system identification and control, including recurrent neural
networks with multiple timesteps in the state. We demonstrate the algorithm on
a two-tank continuous stirred tank reactor. We also demonstrate the algorithm
on a recurrent neural network trained to model an inverted pendulum with
position information only.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, conference, Decision and Control (CDC), 2016 IEEE
55th Conference o
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