Design and manufacturing workshop using the design thinking methodology

Comunicació presentada al ICERI 2019 12th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (Seville, Spain. 11-13 November, 2019).The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss the experience under the methodology of Design Thinking, using a workshop format. This workshop, which took place on October 18th and 19th, 2018, in the BUC (Biblioteca Urbana del Coneixement) building in Vila-real, was attended by about a hundred students who had been displaced from the EASD in Valencia. The objective was to create an artistic work for the municipality of Vila-real with the students collaboration. Design Thinking methodology was implemented to carry out the artistic work. The ultimate goal was not only to get an idea, it was important to build it. The students were able to follow the manufacturing process in collaboration with the KrionTM company that offered their Solid Surface product, which possibilities in design terms this company is currently exploring. This was done in the following months, as the manufacture required its time

Moduli spaces of parabolic U(p,q)U(p,q)-Higgs bundles

Using the $L^2$-norm of the Higgs field as a Morse function, we count the number of connected components of the moduli space of parabolic $U(p,q)$-Higgs bundles over a Riemann surface with a finite number of marked points, under certain genericity conditions on the parabolic structure. This space is homeomorphic to the moduli space of representations of the fundamental group of the punctured surface in $U(p,q)$, with fixed compact holonomy classes around the marked points. We apply our results to the study of representations of the fundamental group of elliptic surfaces of general type.Comment: 46 pages, no figures. Corrected typos, added remarks. To appear in "Quarterly Journal of Mathematics

Taming mismatches in inter-agent distances for the formation-motion control of second-order agents

This paper presents the analysis on the influence of distance mismatches on the standard gradient-based rigid formation control for second-order agents. It is shown that, similar to the first-order case as recently discussed in the literature, these mismatches introduce two undesired group behaviors: a distorted final shape and a steady-state motion of the group formation. We show that such undesired behaviors can be eliminated by combining the standard formation control law with distributed estimators. Finally, we show how the mismatches can be effectively employed as design parameters in order to control a combined translational and rotational motion of the formation.Comment: 14 pages, conditionally accepted in Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions o

Controlling rigid formations of mobile agents under inconsistent measurements

Despite the great success of using gradient-based controllers to stabilize rigid formations of autonomous agents in the past years, surprising yet intriguing undesirable collective motions have been reported recently when inconsistent measurements are used in the agents' local controllers. To make the existing gradient control robust against such measurement inconsistency, we exploit local estimators following the well known internal model principle for robust output regulation control. The new estimator-based gradient control is still distributed in nature and can be constructed systematically even when the number of agents in a rigid formation grows. We prove rigorously that the proposed control is able to guarantee exponential convergence and then demonstrate through robotic experiments and computer simulations that the reported inconsistency-induced orbits of collective movements are effectively eliminated.Comment: 10 page

Distributed scaling control of rigid formations

Recently it has been reported that biased range-measurements among neighboring agents in the gradient distance-based formation control can lead to predictable collective motion. In this paper we take advantage of this effect and by introducing distributed parameters to the prescribed inter-distances we are able to manipulate the steady-state motion of the formation. This manipulation is in the form of inducing simultaneously the combination of constant translational and angular velocities and a controlled scaling of the rigid formation. While the computation of the distributed parameters for the translational and angular velocities is based on the well-known graph rigidity theory, the parameters responsible for the scaling are based on some recent findings in bearing rigidity theory. We carry out the stability analysis of the modified gradient system and simulations in order to validate the main result.Comment: 6 pages In proceedings 55th Conference on Decision and Control, year 201