3DOP: Comfort-oriented Motion Planning for Automated Vehicles with Active Suspensions

Motion comfort is the basis of many societal benefits promised by automated driving and motion planning is primarily responsible for this. By planning the spatial trajectory and the velocity profile, motion planners can significantly enhance motion comfort, ideally without sacrificing time efficiency. Active suspensions can push the boundary...

Planning Natural Locomotion for Articulated Soft Quadrupeds

Embedding elastic elements into legged robots through mechanical design enables highly efficient oscillating patterns that resemble natural gaits. However, current trajectory planning techniques miss the opportunity of taking advantage of these natural motions. This work proposes a locomotion planning method that aims to unify traditional...

Single-Leg Forward Hopping via Nonlinear Modes

Implementing dynamic legged locomotion entails stabilizing oscillatory behaviors in complex mechanical systems. Whenever possible, locomotion algorithms should also exploit the improved capabilities of elastic elements added to the structure to improve efficiency and robustness. This work aims to shed some light on implementing generic dynamic...

Event-Based Communication in Distributed Q-Learning

We present an approach to reduce the communication of information needed on a Distributed Q-Learning system inspired by Event Triggered Control (ETC) techniques. We consider a baseline scenario of a Distributed Q-Learning problem on a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Following an event-based approach, N agents sharing a value function explore the...

Data-Driven Stability Verification of Homogeneous Nonlinear Systems with Unknown Dynamics

In this work, we propose a data-driven approach for the stability analysis of discrete-time homogeneous nonlinear systems with unknown models. The proposed framework is based on constructing Lyapunov functions via a set of data, collected from trajectories of unknown systems, while providing an a-priori guaranteed confidence on the stability of...

Human-robot cooperative object manipulation with contact changes

This paper presents a system for cooperatively manipulating large objects between a human and a robot. This physical interaction system is designed to handle, transport, or manipulate large objects of different shapes in cooperation with a human. Unique points are the bi-manual physical cooperation, the sequential characteristic of the...

Indoor modelling from SLAM-based laser scanner: Door detection to envelope reconstruction

Updated and detailed indoor models are being increasingly demanded for various applications such as emergency management or navigational assistance. The consolidation of new portable and mobile acquisition systems has led to a higher availability of 3D point cloud data from indoors. In this work, we explore the combined use of point clouds...

Parallel autonomy in automated vehicles: Safe motion generation with minimal intervention

Current state-of-the-art vehicle safety systems, such as assistive braking or automatic lane following, are still only able to help in relatively simple driving situations. We introduce a Parallel Autonomy shared-control framework that produces safe trajectories based on human inputs even in much more complex driving scenarios, such as those...

Robust collision avoidance for multiple micro aerial vehicles using nonlinear model predictive control

When several Multirotor Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) share the same airspace, reliable and robust collision avoidance is required. In this paper we address the problem of multi-MAV reactive collision avoidance. We employ a model-based controller to simultaneously track a reference trajectory and avoid collisions. Moreover, to achieve a higher...

Comprehensive comparison of two image-based point clouds from aerial photos with airborne lidar for large-scale mapping: Door detection to envelope reconstruction

The integration of computer vision and photogrammetry to generate three-dimensional (3D) information from images has contributed to a wider use of point clouds, for mapping purposes. Large-scale topographic map production requires 3D data with high precision and accuracy to represent the real conditions of the...

Automatic generation of indoor navigable space using a point cloud and its scanner trajectory

Automatic generation of indoor navigable models is mostly based on 2D floor plans. However, in many cases the floor plans are out of date. Buildings are not always built according to their blue prints, interiors might change after a few years because of modified walls and doors, and furniture may be repositioned to the user's preferences....

A human-like steering model: Sensitive to uncertainty in the environment

The interaction between a human driver and an automated driving system may improve when the automation is designed in such a way that it behaves in a human-like manner. This paper introduces a human-like steering model, in which the driver adapts to the risk due to uncertainty in the environment. Current steering models take a risk-neutral...

Symbolic method for deriving policy in reinforcement learning

This paper addresses the problem of deriving a policy from the value function in the context of reinforcement learning in continuous state and input spaces. We propose a novel method based on genetic programming to construct a symbolic function, which serves as a proxy to the value function and from which a continuous policy is derived. The...

Online policy iterations for optimal control of input-saturated systems

This work proposes an online policy iteration procedure for the synthesis of sub-optimal control laws for uncertain Linear Time Invariant (LTI) Asymptotically Null-Controllable with Bounded Inputs (ANCBI) systems. The proposed policy iteration method relies on: a policy evaluation step with a piecewise quadratic Lyapunov function in both the...