Grasp recognition with spatiotemporal deep learning and proximity sensors in transradial prostheses

The traumatic loss of a hand is a horrific experience usually followed by significant psychological, functional and rehabilitation challenges. Even though much progress has been made in the past decades, the prosthetic challenge of restoring the human hand functionality is still far from being achieved. Autonomous prosthetic hands showed...

Safe & Intelligent Control: Fault-tolerant Flight Control with Distributional and Hybrid Reinforcement Learning using DSAC and IDHP

The critical challenge for employing autonomous control systems in aircraft is ensuring robustness and safety. This study introduces an intelligent and fault-tolerant controller that merges two Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms in a hybrid approach: the Distributional Soft Actor-Critic (DSAC) and the Incremental Dual Heuristic Programming ...

Data-driven optimal control for safe quadrotor navigation in windy environments

Creating autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles for executing complex missions poses various challenges, including safe navigation in the presence of external wind disturbances. Most current navigation methods handle external wind disturbances through real-time estimation and rejection algorithms in the control stage, but lack safety guarantees in...

Distributional Reinforcement Learning for Flight Control: A risk-sensitive approach to aircraft attitude control using Distributional RL

With the recent increase in the complexity of aerospace systems and autonomous operations, there is a need for an increased level of adaptability and model-free controller synthesis. Such operations require the controller to maintain safety and performance without human intervention in non-static environments with partial observability and...

Incremental Adaptation of Behaviour Trees for Applications in Learning from Demonstration Frameworks

This thesis proposes the novel Behaviour Tree Update Framework (BTUF) for the initial construction and continuous incremental adaptation of Behaviour Trees (BTs) for applications in Learning from Demonstration (LfD) frameworks to create complex robot behaviours associated with Activities of Daily Living (ADL) without requiring the user to have a...

Autonomous control for miniaturized mobile robots in unknown pipe networks

Despite recent advances in robotic technology, sewer pipe inspection is still limited to conventional approaches that use cable-tethered robots. Such commercially available tethered robots lack autonomy, and their operation must be manually controlled via their tethered cables. Consequently, they can only travel to a certain distance in pipe,...

Tools for stimulating interaction amongst passengers of autonomous vehicles

This project is focussed on a design for stimulating interaction amongst passengers in the Seabubble. The Seabubble is an autonomous hydrofoil that is able to fly above water. The Seabubble can transport 4 to 5 passengers on inland waterways. The hydrofoil-technology creates a whole new travel-experience because it provides very stable and...

The Landing of a Quadcopter on Inclined Surfaces using Reinforcement Learning

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) enables us to design controllers for complex tasks with a deep learning approach. It allows us to design controllers that are otherwise cumbersome to design with conventional control methodologies. Often, an objective for RL is binary in nature. However, exploring in environments with sparse rewards is a problem...

Exploring reinforcement learning methods for autonomous sequencing and spacing of aircraft

Research on reinforcement learning algorithms to play complex video games have brought forth controllers surpassing human performance. This paper explores the possibilities of applying these techniques to the sequencing and spacing of aircraft. Two experiments are performed. First a single aircraft must learn to fly a 4D trajectory using only...

State-of-the-Art Research on Motion Control of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships

At present, with the development of waterborne transport vehicles, research on ship faces a new round of challenges in terms of intelligence and autonomy. The concept of maritime autonomous surface ships (MASS) has been put forward by the International Maritime Organization in 2017, in which MASS become the new focus of the waterborne...

Human demonstrations for fast and safe exploration in reinforcement learning

Sweetgum Panels: A periodic compliant mechanism for solar shading

The paper describes a novel technique for creating flat, bi-layer, compliant mechanisms for adaptive building components to be used in solar shading. Micro-actuation of these periodic, flexible devices cause innumerable three-dimensional micro-loops to erupt in the panel surface, permitting passage of diffused light while maintaining visual...