Related papers: Variable-Horizon Guidance for Autonomous Rendezvou…
Navigation underwater traditionally is done by keeping a safe distance from obstacles, resulting in "fly-overs" of the area of interest. Movement of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) through a cluttered space, such as a shipwreck or a…
This work proposes an autonomous docking control for nonholonomic constrained mobile robots and applies it to an intelligent mobility device or wheelchair for assisting the user in approaching resting furniture such as a chair or a bed. We…
The paper describes a receding horizon control design framework for continuous-time stochastic nonlinear systems subject to probabilistic state constraints. The intention is to derive solutions that are implementable in real-time on…
Fully actuated omnidirectional UAVs enable independent control of forces and torques along all six degrees of freedom, broadening the operational envelope for agile flight and aerial interaction tasks. However, conventional control…
With the ever growing number of space debris in orbit, the need to prevent further space population is becoming more and more apparent. Refueling, servicing, inspection and deorbiting of spacecraft are some example missions that require…
A model predictive control scheme to stabilize desired configurations of collinear Coulomb spacecraft formations is derived in this paper. The nonlinearities of the dynamics with respect to the input make this problem difficult to solve,…
In emergency search and rescue scenarios, the quick location of trapped people is essential. However, disasters can render the Global Positioning System (GPS) unusable. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with localization devices can serve as…
The trajectory planning problem for a swarm of multiple UAVs is known as a challenging nonconvex optimization problem, particularly due to a large number of collision avoidance constraints required for individual pairs of UAVs in the swarm.…
Ground robots navigating in complex, dynamic environments must compute collision-free trajectories to avoid obstacles safely and efficiently. Nonconvex optimization is a popular method to compute a trajectory in real-time. However, these…
Optimal control problems with discrete-valued inputs are inherently challenging due to their mixed-integer nature, rendering them generally intractable for real-time, safety-critical aerospace applications. Lossless convexification offers a…
This paper focuses on automatic guided vehicle (AGV) trajectory planning in the presence of moving obstacles with known but complicated trajectories. In order to achieve good solution precision, optimality and unification, the concerned…
We consider the problem of trajectory planning in an environment comprised of a set of obstacles with uncertain locations. While previous approaches model the uncertainties with a prescribed Gaussian distribution, we consider the realistic…
Autonomous ships are essentially designed and equipped to perceive their internal and external environment and subsequently perform appropriate actions depending on the predetermined objective(s) without human intervention. Consequently,…
This study presents a fast nonlinear programming algorithm for low-thrust multi-asteroid rendezvous missions. The core contribution is the derivation of analytical formulations for both first- and second-order gradients of low-thrust…
For intelligent quadcopter UAVs, a robust and reliable autonomous planning system is crucial. Most current trajectory planning methods for UAVs are suitable for static environments but struggle to handle dynamic obstacles, which can pose…
In this paper, we present a receding-horizon, sampling-based planner capable of reasoning over multimodal policy distributions. By using the cross-entropy method to optimize a multimodal policy under a common cost function, our approach…
This paper considers the problem of task-dependent (top-down) attention allocation for vision-based autonomous navigation using known landmarks. Unlike the existing paradigm in which landmark selection is formulated as a combinatorial…
In this series of papers, we present a motion planning framework for planning comfortable and customizable motion of nonholonomic mobile robots such as intelligent wheelchairs and autonomous cars. In Part I, we presented the mathematical…
Autonomous satellite servicing missions must execute close-range rendezvous under stringent safety and operational constraints while remaining computationally tractable for onboard use and robust to uncertainty in sensing, actuation, and…
Trajectory optimization of low-thrust perturbed orbit rendezvous is a crucial technology for space missions in low Earth orbits, which is difficult to solve due to its initial value sensitivity, especially when the transfer trajectory has…