Related papers: A Hybrid Systems-based Hierarchical Control Archit…
Multi-agent shepherding represents a challenging distributed control problem where herder agents must coordinate to guide independently moving targets to desired spatial configurations. Most existing control strategies assume cohesive…
Robotic research over the last decades have lead us to different architectures to automatically synthesise discrete event controllers and implement these motion and task plans in real-world robot scenarios. However, these architectures…
Control theoretical techniques have been successfully adopted as methods for self-adaptive systems design to provide formal guarantees about the effectiveness and robustness of adaptation mechanisms. However, the computational effort to…
In this paper we consider the problem of coordinating robotic systems with different kinematics, sensing and vision capabilities to achieve certain mission goals. An approach that makes use of a heterogeneous team of agents has several…
This paper presents a hierarchical control strategy based on hybrid systems theory, nonlinear control, and safety-critical systems to enable cooperative locomotion of robotic guide dogs and visually impaired people. We address…
Rigid bodies, plastic impact, persistent contact, Coulomb friction, and massless limbs are ubiquitous simplifications introduced to reduce the complexity of mechanics models despite the obvious physical inaccuracies that each incurs…
Achieving long term autonomy of robots operating in dynamic environments such as farms remains a significant challenge. Arguably, the most demanding factors to achieve this are the on-board resource constraints such as energy, planning in…
Multi-degree-of-freedom (DOF) robotic manipulators exhibit strongly nonlinear, high-dimensional, and coupled dynamics, posing significant challenges for controller design. To address these issues, this work proposes a unified hybrid control…
Controlling hybrid systems is mostly very challenging due to the variety of dynamics these systems can exhibit. Inspired by the concept of differential flatness of nonlinear continuous systems and their inherent invertibility property, the…
Many new methodologies for the control of large-scale multi-agent systems are based on macroscopic representations of the emerging system dynamics, in the form of continuum approximations of large ensembles. These techniques, that are…
Teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) form typical networked cyber-physical systems that involve the interaction of discrete logic and continuous dynamics. This paper presents a hybrid supervisory control framework for the…
Despite the potential benefits of collaborative robots, effective manipulation tasks with quadruped robots remain difficult to realize. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control system that can handle real-world collaborative…
This paper presents a Mixed-Initiative (MI) framework for addressing the problem of control authority transfer between a remote human operator and an AI agent when cooperatively controlling a mobile robot. Our Hierarchical Expert-guided…
The paper introduces a Data-driven Hierarchical Control (DHC) structure to improve performance of systems operating under the effect of system and/or environment uncertainty. The proposed hierarchical approach consists of two parts: 1) A…
We present a novel vision-based control method to make a group of ground mobile robots achieve a specified formation shape with unspecified size. Our approach uses multiple aerial control units equipped with downward-facing cameras, each…
Mammals can generate autonomous behaviors in various complex environments through the coordination and interaction of activities at different levels of their central nervous system. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical learning…
A swarm robotic system consists of a team of robots performing cooperative tasks without any centralized coordination. In principle, swarms enable flexible and scalable solutions; however, designing individual control algorithms that can…
Field robotics applications, such as search and rescue, involve robots operating in large, unknown areas. These environments present unique challenges that compound the difficulties faced by a robot operator. The use of multi-robot teams,…
Recently several hierarchical inverse dynamics controllers based on cascades of quadratic programs have been proposed for application on torque controlled robots. They have important theoretical benefits but have never been implemented on a…
While social robots are developed to provide assistance to users through social interactions, their behaviors are dominantly pre-programmed and remote-controlled. Despite the numerous robot control architectures being developed, very few…