Perceptions of IUPUI Faculty and Staff Regarding the Center for Service and Learning Faculty/Staff Development Programs

The purpose of this evaluation was to understand perceptions of IUPUI faculty and staff regarding the influence of the Center for Service and Learning’s (CSL) programs and resources on respondents. Specifically, the evaluation was intended to deepen CSL’s understanding of respondents’ experiences as community-engaged professionals at IUPUI. Additionally, the evaluation sought to gather input on new ideas to strengthen CSL services and programming going forward. IUPUI faculty and staff who have participated in CSL workshops, trainings, and/or requested information from CSL were emailed during the fall of 2018 and asked to participate in the Qualtrics survey. The survey was anonymous. This report shares overall findings from the survey and provides general recommendations

A Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Scheme for Cooperative Manipulation with Singularity and Collision Avoidance

This paper addresses the problem of cooperative transportation of an object rigidly grasped by $N$ robotic agents. In particular, we propose a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) scheme that guarantees the navigation of the object to a desired pose in a bounded workspace with obstacles, while complying with certain input saturations of the agents. Moreover, the proposed methodology ensures that the agents do not collide with each other or with the workspace obstacles as well as that they do not pass through singular configurations. The feasibility and convergence analysis of the NMPC are explicitly provided. Finally, simulation results illustrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed method.Comment: Simulation results with 3 agents adde

Speak out for the Homeless

This paper is to advocate for the homeless. Given the limited number of shelters in Indianapolis, it is crucial for social workers to speak out for the homeless

Decentralized Abstractions and Timed Constrained Planning of a General Class of Coupled Multi-Agent Systems

This paper presents a fully automated procedure for controller synthesis for a general class of multi-agent systems under coupling constraints. Each agent is modeled with dynamics consisting of two terms: the first one models the coupling constraints and the other one is an additional bounded control input. We aim to design these inputs so that each agent meets an individual high-level specification given as a Metric Interval Temporal Logic (MITL). Furthermore, the connectivity of the initially connected agents, is required to be maintained. First, assuming a polyhedral partition of the workspace, a novel decentralized abstraction that provides controllers for each agent that guarantee the transition between different regions is designed. The controllers are the solution of a Robust Optimal Control Problem (ROCP) for each agent. Second, by utilizing techniques from formal verification, an algorithm that computes the individual runs which provably satisfy the high-level tasks is provided. Finally, simulation results conducted in MATLAB environment verify the performance of the proposed framework