Control for Bipolar DC Microgrid and DC/DC Bidirectional Converter in Energy Access Context

Rural electrification remains a significant challenge for engineers, given its intricate relationship with multiple issues, including geographical constraints and underdeveloped infrastructural provisions. As a result, with the development of Solar Home Systems (SHS) and direct current (DC) microgrids, DC systems for energy access have emerged...

Active Vibration Control: using over-sensing and over-actuation

The demand for faster production times and higher precisions in the industrial automation is ever-increasing. Resonance modes caused by flexural elements in these machines are limiting the maximum bandwidth. Because of this, high-precision motion systems in industrial machines are limited in the maximum operating speed and precision. To improve...

Mitigating the Impacts of the Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure on Residential Grids: Next Generation Grid Operations Knowledge Framework

With the advancements in technology and the enforcement of governmental regulations and incentives, the share of electric vehicles (EVs) in the mobility sector is on the rise. Although this aids the transition into a greener future with net-zero carbon emissions, the increase in EV penetration rates can have immense impacts on the grid and its...

Sample-efficient multi-agent reinforcement learning using learned world models

Multi-agent robotic systems could benefit from reinforcement learning algorithms that are able to learn behaviours in a small number trials, a property known as sample efficiency. This research investigates the use of learned world models to create more sample-efficient algorithms. We present a novel multi-agent model-based reinforcement...

An Exploration of Integrated Bi-level Local and Global Model Predictive Control for Air Traffic Control Applications

A hierarchical bi-level model predictive controller is proposed in this thesis to reduce the computational complexity of controlling a large scale air traffic control problem, using a model predictive control approach. The bi-level controller developed and tested in this research project is a combination of a global, long-term, slow-rate,...

Network Decentralized Collision Avoidance with Applications in a Scalable Unmanned Aerial System Testbed

Decentralized control and estimation are both active research areas in the field of systems and control. A new approach to these topics utilizes graph theory to characterize inter-agent communication as a graph that, in this thesis, can have time-varying topology. This approach has been named "network-decentralized" and the use of network...

Decentralized Collision Avoidance of Multi-Agent Systems in 3-Dimensional Space

Multi-Agent Systems, often referred to a network of loosely connected autonomous units, are widely used to model the dynamics of crowds, vehicles, robots and swarms in traffic management, biological environment, distributed control and communication technologies. Recently, the study of multi-agent systems is rapidly growing due to the beneficial...

Control of a DC Microgrid

The growth of distributed Renewable Energy share in the total electricity production as wells as technological advancements in power electronics and increase of DC loads, point towards the development of the DC microgrid (DCMG) concept as a valid model for future energy systems especially for operations and locations where the existing grid...

Network-Decentralized Control with Collision Avoidance for Multi-Agent Systems

An often preferred method to control a multi-agent system is by a network-decentralised controller. Network-decentralised means that each agent only has knowledge about its own state and the state of its neighbouring agents. In this thesis the multi-agent system consists of holonomic robots moving in a 2-dimensional configuration space. Each...

Decentralization in Air Transportation

In this work,we demonstrate that decentralized control can result in stable, efficient, and robust operations in the Air Transportation System. We implement decentralized control for aircraft taxiing operations and use Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation to analyze the resulting system behavior Decentralized controllers at each intersection of...