Exploring Active Inference and Model Predictive Path Integral Control: A Journey from Low-Level Commands to Task and Motion Planning

In an ever-evolving society, the demand for autonomous robots equipped with human-level capabilities is becoming increasingly imperative. Various factors, such as an aging population and a shortage of labor for repetitive and physically demanding tasks, have underscored the need for capable autonomous robots to assist us in our daily activities....

Adaptive control of interconnected and muliti-agent systems

This thesis deals with the adaptive control of interconnected systems and multi-agent systems, where adaptive control is used to deal with the presence of uncertainties. Generally, two types of uncertainties can occur. The first one is parametric uncertainty, which is most commonly addressed in the literature, and for which several design...

Control for autonomous all-electric ships: Integrating maneuvering, energy management, and power generation control

In the last few years, autonomous shipping has been under extensive consideration by academic and industrial communities as well as governmental organizations due to several potential advantages that it introduces. Furthermore, due to the drastic environmental consequences of transport overwater, international organizations have enforced the...

Control of Switched Linear Systems: Adaptation and Robustness

As a special class of hybrid systems, switched systems have attracted a lot of attention in the last decade due to theoretical and practical interests. When controlling switched systems, a ubiquitous problem is the presence of large parametric uncertainties and external disturbances. However, the state of the art on adaptive and robust control...

Online reinforcement learning control for aerospace systems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are relatively new in the field of aerospace guidance, navigation, and control. This dissertation aims to exploit RL methods to improve the autonomy and online learning of aerospace systems with respect to the a priori unknown system and environment, dynamical uncertainties, and partial observability. In the...

Autonomous landing of Micro Air Vehicles through bio-inspired monocular vision

Adaptive thermal comfort opportunities for dwellings: Providing thermal comfort only when and where needed in dwellings in the Netherlands

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Model and Sensor Based Nonlinear Adaptive Flight Control with Online System Identification

Consensus exists that many loss-of-control (LOC) in flight accidents caused by severe aircraft damage or system failure could be prevented if flight performance could be recovered using the valid and remaining control authorities. However, the safe maneuverability of a post-failure aircraft will inevitably be reduced due to the malfunction. Non...

Adaptive Backstepping Control and Safety Analysis for Modern Fighter Aircraft

There exist many examples of aircraft incidents in which the pilots have successfully used the remaining control authority over an aircraft to save the airframe and its passengers and cargo from apparently hopeless failure conditions. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Several accidents happened in which the crew was not able to save the...

Adaptive Backstepping Flight Control for Modern Fighter Aircraft

The main goal of this thesis is to investigate the potential of the nonlinear adaptive backstepping control technique in combination with online model identification for the design of a reconfigurable flight control system for a modern fighter aircraft. Adaptive backstepping is a recursive, Lyapunov-based, nonlinear design method, that makes use...

Fault Tolerant Flight Control: A Physical Model Approach

Safety is of paramount importance in all transportation systems, but especially in civil aviation. Therefore, in civil aviation, a lot of developments focus on the improvement of safety levels and reducing the risks that critical failures occur. When one analyses recent aircraft accident statistics, it is clear that a significant portion is...