Related papers: Stranding Risk for Underactuated Vessels in Comple…
When deploying robots in shallow ocean waters, wave disturbances can be significant, highly dynamic and pose problems when operating near structures; this is a key limitation of current control strategies, restricting the range of…
Hurricanes are cyclones circulating about a defined center whose closed wind speeds exceed 75 mph originating over tropical and subtropical waters. At landfall, hurricanes can result in severe disasters. The accuracy of predicting their…
This article presents a new algorithm for short-term maritime collision avoidance (COLAV) named the branching-course MPC (BC-MPC) algorithm. The algorithm is designed to be robust with respect to noise on obstacle estimates, which is a…
Road traffic crashes have been the leading cause of death among young people. Most of these accidents occur when the driver becomes distracted due to fatigue or external factors. Vehicle platooning systems such as Cooperative Adaptive…
We present an analytical method to estimate the continuous-time collision probability of motion plans for autonomous agents with linear controlled Ito dynamics. Motion plans generated by planning algorithms cannot be perfectly executed by…
Weather routing methods are essential for planning routes for commercial shipping and recreational craft. This paper provides a methodology for quantifying the significance of numerical error and performance model uncertainty on the…
We study the navigation problem for a robot moving amidst static and dynamic obstacles and rely on a hierarchical approach to solve it. First, the reference trajectory is planned by the safe interval path planning algorithm that is capable…
Reliable operation in power systems is becoming more difficult as the penetration of random renewable resources increases. In particular, operators face the risk of not scheduling enough traditional generators in the times when renewable…
Critical evaluation and understanding of ship responses in the ocean is important for not only the design and engineering of future platforms but also the operation and safety of those that are currently deployed. Simulations or experiments…
Density of the reachable states can help understand the risk of safety-critical systems, especially in situations when worst-case reachability is too conservative. Recent work provides a data-driven approach to compute the density…
Autonomous robots commonly aim to complete a nominal behavior while minimizing a cost; this leaves them vulnerable to failure or unplanned scenarios, where a backup or contingency plan to a safe set is needed to avoid a total mission…
Neural Networks (NNs) can provide major empirical performance improvements for robotic systems, but they also introduce challenges in formally analyzing those systems' safety properties. In particular, this work focuses on estimating the…
Operating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in complex environments that feature dynamic obstacles and external disturbances poses significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent uncertainty in such scenarios. Additionally, inaccurate…
Catastrophic failures of marine engines imply severe loss of functionality and destroy or damage the systems irreversibly. Being sudden and often unpredictable events, they pose a severe threat to navigation, crew, and passengers. The…
We present safe control of partially-observed linear time-varying systems in the presence of unknown and unpredictable process and measurement noise. We introduce a control algorithm that minimizes dynamic regret, i.e., that minimizes the…
Spacecraft operations are influenced by uncertainties such as dynamics modeling, navigation, and maneuver execution errors. Although mission design has traditionally incorporated heuristic safety margins to mitigate the effect of…
We present ORCAst, a multi-stage, multi-arm network for Operational high-Resolution Current forecAsts over one week. Producing real-time nowcasts and forecasts of ocean surface currents is a challenging problem due to indirect or incomplete…
When deploying autonomous systems in unknown and changing environments, it is critical that their motion planning and control algorithms are computationally efficient and can be reapplied online in real time, whilst providing theoretical…
This paper proposes a method for formation path following control of a fleet of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles. The proposed method combines several hierarchic tasks in a null space-based behavioral algorithm to safely guide…
Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…