Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) units in buildings form a system-of-subsystems entity that must be accurately integrated and controlled by the building automation system to ensure the occupants' comfort with reduced energy consumption. As control of HVACs involves a standardized hierarchy of high-level set-point control and low-level Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controls, there is a need for overcoming current control fragmentation without disrupting the standard hierarchy. In this work, we propose a model-based approach to achieve these goals. In particular: The set-point control is based on a predictive HVAC thermal model, and aims at optimizing thermal comfort with reduced energy consumption; the standard low-level PID controllers are auto-tuned based on simulations of the HVAC thermal model, and aims at good tracking of the set points. One benefit of such control structure is that the PID dynamics are included in the predictive optimization: in this way, we are able to account for tracking transients, which are particularly useful if the HVAC is switched on and off depending on occupancy patterns. Experimental and simulation validation via a three-room test case at the Delft University of Technology shows the potential for a high degree of comfort while also reducing energy consumption.

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This paper establishes a novel online fault detection and identification strategy for a class of continuous piecewise affine (PWA) systems, namely, bimodal and trimodal PWA systems. The main contributions with respect to the state-of-the-art are the recursive nature of the proposed scheme and the consideration of parametric uncertainties in both partitions and in subsystems parameters. In order to handle this situation, we recast the continuous PWA into its max-form representation and we exploit the recursive Newton-Gauss algorithm on a suitable cost function to derive the adaptive laws to estimate online the unknown subsystem parameters, the partitions, and the loss in control authority for the PWA model. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is verified via simulations applied to the benchmark example of a wheeled mobile robot.

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When driving in urban environments, an autonomous vehicle must account for the interaction with other traffic participants. It must reason about their future behavior, how its actions affect their future behavior, and potentially
consider multiple motion hypothesis. In this paper we introduce a method for joint behavior estimation and trajectory planning that models interaction and multi-policy decisionmaking. The method leverages Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes to estimate the behavior of other traffic participants given the planned trajectory for the ego-vehicle, and Receding-Horizon Control for generating safe trajectories for the ego-vehicle. To achieve safe navigation we introduce chance constraints over multiple motion policies in the recedinghorizon planner. These constraints account for uncertainty over
the behavior of other traffic participants. The method is capable of running in real-time and we show its performance and good scalability in simulated multi-vehicle intersection scenarios.@en

In this paper, an adaptive control scheme for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) path following under slowly time-varying wind is developed. The proposed control strategy integrates the path following law based on the vector field method with an adaptive term counteracting the effect of wind's unknown component. In particular, it is shown that the path following error is bounded under slowly time-varying unknown wind and converges to zero for unknown constant wind. Numerical simulations illustrate that, in environments with unknown and slowly time-varying wind conditions, the proposed method compensates for the lack of knowledge of the wind vector, and attains a smaller path following error than state-of-the-art vector field method.

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