Related papers: Decreasing flow uncertainty in Bayesian inverse pr…
Zermelo's navigation problem seeks the trajectory of minimal travel time between two points in a fluid flow. We address this problem for an agent -- such as a micro-robot or active particle -- that is advected by a two-dimensional flow,…
In marine plankton, many swimming species can perceive their environment with flow sensors. Can they use this flow information to travel faster in turbulence? To address this question, we consider plankters swimming at constant speed, whose…
Microswimming cells and robots exhibit diverse behaviours due to both their swimming and their environment. One of the core environmental features impacting inertialess swimming is background flows. While the influence of select flows,…
We study the problem of optimally managing an inventory with unknown demand trend. Our formulation leads to a stochastic control problem under partial observation, in which a Brownian motion with non-observable drift can be singularly…
In the last years, a growing number of challenging applications in navigation, logistics, and tourism were modeled as orienteering problems. This problem has been proposed in relation to a sport race where certain control points must be…
Floating offshore wind turbines allow wind energy to be harvested in deep waters. However, additional dynamics and structural loads may result when the floating platform is being excited by wind and waves. In this work, the conventional…
A current-aided inertial navigation framework is proposed for small autonomous underwater vehicles in long-duration operations (> 1 hour), where neither frequent surfacing nor consistent bottom-tracking are available. We instantiate this…
A class of nonlinear control-affine systems with bounded time-varying drift is considered. It is assumed that the control vector fields together with their iterated Lie brackets satisfy Hormander's condition in a neighborhood of the origin.…
Urban traffic congestion is a chronic problem faced by many cities in the US and worldwide. It results in inefficient infrastructure use as well as increased vehicle fuel consumption and emission levels. Congestion is intertwined with…
Climate models are often affected by long-term drift that is revealed by the evolution of global variables such as the ocean temperature or the surface air temperature. This spurious trend reduces the fidelity to initial conditions and has…
We consider the nonlinear optimal control of bypass transition in a boundary layer flow subjected to a pair of free stream vortical perturbations using a receding horizon approach. The optimal control problem is solved using the Lagrange…
This work aims at finding optimal navigation policies for thin, deformable microswimmers that progress in a viscous fluid by propagating a sinusoidal undulation along their slender body. These active filaments are embedded in a prescribed,…
The notion of drift refers to the phenomenon that the distribution, which is underlying the observed data, changes over time. Albeit many attempts were made to deal with drift, formal notions of drift are application-dependent and…
Marine vehicles have been used for various scientific missions where information over features of interest is collected. In order to maximise efficiency in collecting information over a large search space, we should be able to deploy a…
We describe the development of a tracking device, mounted on an epi-fluorescent inverted microscope, suited to obtain time resolved 3D Lagrangian tracks of fluorescent passive or active micro-objects in micro-fluidic devices. The system is…
This paper utilizes an anomaly detection algorithm to check if underwater gliders are operating normally in the unknown ocean environment. Glider pilots can be warned of the detected glider anomaly in real time, thus taking over the glider…
Inverse problems, i.e., estimating parameters of physical models from experimental data, are ubiquitous in science and engineering. The Bayesian formulation is the gold standard because it alleviates ill-posedness issues and quantifies…
We propose a defiltering method of turbulent flow fields for Lagrangian particle tracking using machine learning techniques. Numerical simulation of Lagrangian particle tracking is commonly used in various fields. In general, practical…
Smart active particles can acquire some limited knowledge of the fluid environment from simple mechanical cues and exert a control on their preferred steering direction. Their goal is to learn the best way to navigate by exploiting the…
Estimating ocean flow fields in 3D is a critical step in enabling the reliable operation of underwater gliders and other small, low-powered autonomous marine vehicles. Existing methods produce depth-averaged 2D layers arranged at discrete…