Related papers: Achieving Precisely-Assigned Performance Requireme…
Although acrobatic flight control has been studied extensively, one key limitation of the existing methods is that they are usually restricted to specific maneuver tasks and cannot change flight pattern parameters online. In this work, we…
Manipulating three-dimensional (3D) deformable objects presents significant challenges for robotic systems due to their infinite-dimensional state space and complex deformable dynamics. This paper proposes a novel model-free approach for…
We develop optimal control strategies for autonomous vehicles (AVs) that are required to meet complex specifications imposed as rules of the road (ROTR) and locally specific cultural expectations of reasonable driving behavior. We formulate…
Acceleration-commanded guidance laws (e.g., proportional navigation) are attractive for high-level decision making, but their direct deployment on fixed-wing UAVs is challenging because accelerations are not directly actuated and must be…
Tasks for autonomous robotic systems commonly require stabilization to a desired region while maintaining safety specifications. However, solving this multi-objective problem is challenging when the dynamics are nonlinear and…
In many resource-limited optimal control problems, multiple constraints may be enforced that are jointly infeasible due to external factors such as subsystem failures, unexpected disturbances, or fuel limitations. In this manuscript, we…
This paper presents a general framework for solving the control allocation problem (CAP) in thrust-vector controlled rigid-bodies with an arbitrary number of thrusters. Two novel solutions are proposed: a closed-form, Lipschitz continuous…
In this paper, a novel online, output-feedback, critic-only, model-based reinforcement learning framework is developed for safety-critical control systems operating in complex environments. The developed framework ensures system stability…
We study a control architecture for nonlinear constrained systems that integrates a performance-boosting (PB) controller with a scheduled Predictive Safety Filter (PSF). The PSF acts as a pre-stabilizing base controller that enforces state…
We study convergence and stability properties of control-affine systems. Our considerations are motivated by the problem of stabilizing a control-affine system by means of output feedback for states in which the output function attains an…
Statistical performance bounds for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be critical for high-stakes applications like healthcare. This paper introduces a new framework for theoretically measuring the performance of such algorithms…
We present the activities carried out to calibrate and characterise the performance of the elements of attitude control and measurement on board the Herschel spacecraft. The main calibration parameters and the evolution of the indicators of…
This paper is concerned with devising the nonlinear optimal guidance for intercepting a stationary target with a fixed impact time. According to Pontryagin's Maximum Principle (PMP), some optimality conditions for the solutions of the…
This paper presents a novel approach employing prescribed performance control to address the distributed fault-tolerant formation control problem in a heterogeneous UAV-UGV cooperative system under a directed interaction topology and…
Safety critical systems involve the tight coupling between potentially conflicting control objectives and safety constraints. As a means of creating a formal framework for controlling systems of this form, and with a view toward automotive…
We introduce an alternative approach for the analysis and numerical approximation of the optimal feedback control mapping. It consists in looking at a typical optimal control problem in such a way that feasible controls are mappings…
In order to address the need for an affordable reduced gravity test platform, this work focuses on the analysis and implementation of atmospheric acceleration tracking with an autonomous aerial vehicle. As proof of concept, the vehicle is…
This paper considers the relaxed version of the transport problem for general nonlinear control systems, where the objective is to design time-varying feedback laws that transport a given initial probability measure to a target probability…
Sequential Convex Programming (SCP) has recently gained significant popularity as an effective method for solving optimal control problems and has been successfully applied in several different domains. However, the theoretical analysis of…
In this paper, problems of optimal control are considered where in the objective function, in addition to the control cost there is a tracking term that measures the distance to a desired stationary state. The tracking term is given by some…