Robust hybrid control for autonomous vehicle motion planning

Abstract

The operation of an autonomous vehicle in an unknown, dynamic environment is a very complex problem, especially when the vehicle is required to use its full maneuvering capabilities, and to react in real time to changes in they operational environment. A possible approach to reduce the computational complexity of the motion planning problem for a nonlinear, high dimensional system, is based on a quantization of the system dynamics, leading to a control architecture based on a hybrid automaton, the states of which represent feasible trajectory primitives for the vehicle. This paper focuses on the feasibility of this approach, in the presence of disturbances and uncertainties in the plant and/or in the environment: the structure of a Robust Hybrid Automaton is defined and its properties are analyzed. In particular, we address the issues of well-posedness, consistency and reachability. For the case of autonomous vehicles, we provide sufficient conditions to guarantee reachability of the automaton.

Contextual Sequence Prediction with Application to Control Library Optimization

“…[23]). Similarly, recording demonstrated trajectories of experts aggressively flying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has enabled dynamically feasible trajectories to be quickly generated by concatenating a suitable subset of stored trajectories in the control library [10].…”

Sufficient Conditions for the Existence of Resolution Complete Planning Algorithms

“…More importantly, the functional analysis framework provides some practical implication. For example, consider a system which is symmetric under Lie group transformations [10]. Moreover, suppose the dispersion of a given set of motion primitives is limited by ε > 0 in the set of all trajectories with the final time bounded by ∆t.…”

“…This is analogous to classical Turing decidability vs. Turing recognizability, which are comparable to completeness and resolution completeness, respectively. We believe that having general conditions for the existence of resolution complete algorithms may be useful in the formulation of solvable robotics problems, in the design of better sampling-based planning algorithms, in the design of motion primitives [9,10,11], and possibly for the verification problem [12,13], which is a negated form of planning that establishes path nonexistence.…”

Optimal switching control of burner setting for a compact marine boiler design

“…Due to the nature of the switches more than one consecutive switch at the same time instance is not allowed. The transition matrices M j,k , g j,k are related to manoeuvres and hence do not represent instantaneous jumps in the state (here lending terminology from Frazzoli, 2001;Frazzoli, Dahleh, & Feron, 1999 where such manoeuvres made up a manoeuvre automaton for shifting between trim trajectories in helicopter flight). Instead the manoeuvres are time intervals in which the state is taken from x(t À ) to x(t + ) in time dT j,k .…”