Towards the Exhaustive Verification of Real-Time Aspects in Controller Implementation

In industrial applications, the number of final products endowed with real-time automatic control systems that manage critical situations as far as human safety is concerned has dramatically increased. Thus, it is of growing importance that the control system design flow encompasses also its translation into software code and its embedding into a hardware and software network. In this paper, a tool-supported approach to the formal analysis of real-time aspects in controller implementation is proposed. The analysis can ensure that some desired properties of the control loop are preserved in its implementation on a distributed architecture. Moreover, the information extracted automatically from the model can also be used to approach straightforwardly some design problems, such as the hardwar

Qualification and Quantification of Fairness for Sustainable Mobility Policies

The adoption of new mobility technologies on a large-scale plays a crucial role to promote a green transition in the mobility field. Nonetheless, the acceptance of new mobility solutions implies radical changes in the everyday lives of individuals and, thus, it can be hampered by many different factors besides transport habits, such as socio-economic individual features. For this reason, it is essential to design human-centered policies directly addressing such barriers, avoiding the unwanted effect of amplifying inequalities at the edges of society. To this end, we propose a data-driven approach to embed socio-economic factors in the design of new mobility strategies that quantitatively account for fairness in a control-oriented and dynamic fashion. The formalization (and the inclusion in the approach) of the concepts of doxastic equality and equity allows us to mitigate epistemic exclusions, assessing system fairness. Thus, by combining tools from the control framework with those of philosophy, our approach offers an actionable tool for the support of the design of fair policies to foster the adoption of sustainable mobility habits.</p

SINDy vs Hard Nonlinearities and Hidden Dynamics: a Benchmarking Study

In this work we analyze the effectiveness of the Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) technique on three benchmark datasets for nonlinear identification, to provide a better understanding of its suitability when tackling real dynamical systems. While SINDy can be an appealing strategy for pursuing physics-based learning, our analysis highlights difficulties in dealing with unobserved states and non-smooth dynamics. Due to the ubiquity of these features in real systems in general, and control applications in particular, we complement our analysis with hands-on approaches to tackle these issues in order to exploit SINDy also in these challenging contexts.Comment: Submitted to IFAC SYSID 202

Analysis and development of a novel algorithm for the in-vehicle hand-usage of a smartphone

Smartphone usage while driving is unanimously considered to be a really dangerous habit due to strong correlation with road accidents. In this paper, the problem of detecting whether the driver is using the phone during a trip is addressed. To do this, high-frequency data from the triaxial inertial measurement unit (IMU) integrated in almost all modern phone is processed without relying on external inputs so as to provide a self-contained approach. By resorting to a frequency-domain analysis, it is possible to extract from the raw signals the useful information needed to detect when the driver is using the phone, without being affected by the effects that vehicle motion has on the same signals. The selected features are used to train a Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. The performance of the proposed approach are analyzed and tested on experimental data collected during mixed naturalistic driving scenarios, proving the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Performance analysis of an optical distance sensor for roll angle estimation in sport motorcycles

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Switched Integral Suboptimal Second-Order Sliding Mode Control

This paper presents a switched formulation of the suboptimal second-order integral sliding mode control law that has recently appeared in the literature. The integral approach maintains the good properties of the Suboptimal Second Order Sliding Mode (SSOSM) algorithm in terms of chattering alleviation, but, in addition avoids the reaching phase and keeps the controlled system trajectory on the sliding manifold since the initial time instant. Besides these features, the switched formulation adapts the control gains in different regions of the state space, providing the flexibility needed to accommodate different design objectives when moving towards the desired equilibrium. The paper discusses the properties of the proposed algorithm on a realistic example, that is the lateral dynamics control of a ground vehicle in which the yaw-rate tracking is typically made difficult by parametric uncertainties and nonlinear effects arising with large steering angles