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Commercial UAVs are an emerging security threat as they are capable of carrying hazardous payloads or disrupting air traffic. To counter UAVs, we introduce an autonomous 3D target encirclement and interception strategy. Unlike traditional…
In this paper, we address the problem of circumnavigation of a stationary target by a heterogeneous group comprising of $\textbf{n}$ autonomous agents, having unicycle kinematics. The agents are assumed to have constant linear speeds, we…
This work addresses the problem of constrained motion control of the uncrewed surface vessels. The constraints are imposed on states/inputs of the vehicles due to the physical limitations, mission requirements, and safety considerations. We…
Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…
Designing controllers that accomplish tasks while guaranteeing safety constraints remains a significant challenge. We often want an agent to perform well in a nominal task, such as environment exploration, while ensuring it can avoid unsafe…
Reinforcement learning (RL) can be highly effective at learning goal-reaching policies, but it typically does not provide formal guarantees that the goal will always be reached. A common approach to provide formal goal-reaching guarantees…
We propose a hybrid feedback control strategy that safely steers a point-mass robot to a target location optimally from all initial conditions in the n-dimensional Euclidean space with a single spherical obstacle. The robot moves straight…
This paper investigates the problem of controlling an autonomous agent to simultaneously localize and circumnavigate an unknown stationary target using bearing-only measurements (without explicit differentiation). To improve the convergence…
Designing a model predictive control (MPC) scheme that enables a mobile robot to safely navigate through an obstacle-filled environment is a complicated yet essential task in robotics. In this technical report, safety refers to ensuring…
The paper addresses the problem of controller synthesis for control-affine nonlinear systems to meet reach-avoid-stay specifications. Specifically, the goal of the research is to obtain a closed-form control law ensuring that the…
An outstanding challenge for the widespread deployment of robotic systems like autonomous vehicles is ensuring safe interaction with humans without sacrificing performance. Existing safety methods often neglect the robot's ability to learn…
In this paper, we consider the problem of using a robot to explore an environment with an unknown, state-dependent disturbance function while avoiding some forbidden areas. The goal of the robot is to safely collect observations of the…
Motion control of underwater robotic vehicles is a demanding task with great challenges imposed by external disturbances, model uncertainties and constraints of the operating workspace. Thus, robust motion control is still an open issue for…
In this paper, a safety-critical control strategy for a nonholonomic robot is developed to generate control signals that result in optimal, obstacle-free paths through dynamic environments. We formulate the control synthesis problem as an…
Learning controllers merely based on a performance metric has been proven effective in many physical and non-physical tasks in both control theory and reinforcement learning. However, in practice, the controller must guarantee some notion…
A group of wheeled robots with nonholonomic constraints is considered to rendezvous at a common specified setpoint with a desired orientation while maintaining network connectivity and ensuring collision avoidance within the robots. Given…
Control barrier functions are widely used to enforce safety properties in robot motion planning and control. However, the problem of constructing barrier functions online and synthesizing safe controllers that can deal with the associated…
We present a decentralized control algorithm for a robotic swarm given the task of encapsulating static and moving targets in a bounded unknown environment. We consider minimalist robots without memory, explicit communication, or…
We develop a control algorithm that ensures the safety, in terms of confinement in a set, of a system with unknown, 2nd-order nonlinear dynamics. The algorithm establishes novel connections between data-driven and robust, nonlinear control.…
This paper presents tracking control laws for two different objectives of a nonholonomic system - a spherical robot - using a geometric approach. The first control law addresses orientation tracking using a modified trace potential…