Cooperative Passivity-Based Control of Nonlinear Mechanical Systems

In this work, we propose two cooperative passivity-based control methods for networks of mechanical systems. By cooperatively synchronizing the end-effector coordinates of the individual agents, we achieve cooperation between systems of different types. The underlying passivity property of our control approaches ensures that cooperation is...

Ankle-Foot-Orthosis “Hermes” Compensates Pathological Ankle Stiffness of Chronic Stroke—A Proof of Concept

Individuals with an upper motor neuron syndrome, e.g., stroke survivors, may have a pathological increase of passive ankle stiffness due to spasticity, that impairs ankle function and activities such as walking. To improve mobility, walking aids such as ankle-foot orthoses and orthopaedic shoes are prescribed. However, these walking aids...

COLREGs-aware Trajectory Optimization for Autonomous Surface Vessels

This paper presents a rule-compliant trajectory optimization method for the guidance and control of autonomous surface vessels. The method builds on Model Predictive Contouring Control and incorporates the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea - known as COLREGs - relevant for motion planning. We use these traffic rules...

Visually-guided motion planning for autonomous driving from interactive demonstrations

The successful integration of autonomous robots in real-world environments strongly depends on their ability to reason from context and take socially acceptable actions. Current autonomous navigation systems mainly rely on geometric information and hard-coded rules to induce safe and socially compliant behaviors. Yet, in unstructured urban...

Scenario-Based Trajectory Optimization in Uncertain Dynamic Environments

We present an optimization-based method to plan the motion of an autonomous robot under the uncertainties associated with dynamic obstacles, such as humans. Our method bounds the marginal risk of collisions at each point in time by incorporating chance constraints into the planning problem. This problem is not suitable for online optimization...

Cooperative R-passivity based control for mechanical systems

In this work we consider the problem of cooperative end-effector control between heterogeneous fully actuated agents when varying-time delays and/or packet loss are present. We couple agents via outputs encoded with task-space coordinates and velocities that are transformed into wave-variables to overcome the destabilising effects of the...

Mission-Driven Resource Management for Reconfigurable Sensing Systems

Modern sensors, such as multifunctional radars, comprise many settings and the number of controllable settings is increasing due to technological advance. Although having many settings allows many capabilities, it simultaneously requires an automatic manager to control them. This paper proposes mission-driven resource management to control...