No Arabic abstract
The paper considers autonomous rendezvous maneuver and proximity operations of two spacecraft in presence of obstacles. A strategy that combines guidance and control algorithms is analyzed. The proposed closed-loop system is able to guarantee a safe path in a real environment, as well as robustness with respect to external disturbances and dynamic obstacles. The guidance strategy exploits a suitably designed Artificial Potential Field (APF), while the controller relies on Sliding Mode Control (SMC), for both position and attitude tracking of the spacecraft. As for the position control, two different first order SMC methods are considered, namely the component-wise and the simplex-based control techniques. The proposed integrated guidance and control strategy is validated by extensive simulations performed with a six degree-of-freedom (DOF) orbital simulator and appears suitable for real-time control with minimal on-board computational effort. Fuel consumption and control effort are evaluated, including different update frequencies of the closed-loop software.
In adaptive sliding mode control methods, an updating gain strategy associated with finite-time convergence to the sliding set is essential to deal with matched bounded perturbations with unknown upper-bound. However, the estimation of the finite time of any adaptive design is a complicated task since it depends not only on the upper-bound of unknown perturbation but also on the size of initial conditions. This brief proposes a uniform adaptive reaching phase strategy (ARPS) within a predefined reaching-time. Moreover, as a case of study, the barrier function approach is extended for perturbed MIMO systems with uncertain control matrix. The usage of proposed ARPS in the MIMO case solves simultaneously two issues: giving a uniform reaching phase with a predefined reaching-time and adapting to the perturbation norm while in a predefined vicinity of the sliding manifold.
One of the most important branches of nonlinear control theory is the so-called sliding-mode. Its aim is the design of a (nonlinear) feedback law that brings and maintains the state trajectory of a dynamic system on a given sliding surface. Here, dynamics becomes completely independent of the model parameters and can be tuned accordingly to the desired target. In this paper we study this problem when the feedback law is subject to strong structural constraints. In particular, we assume that the control input may take values only over two bounded and disjoint sets. Such sets could be also non perfectly known a priori. An example is a control input allowed to switch only between two values. Under these peculiarities, we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions that guarantee sliding-mode control effectiveness for a class of time-varying continuous-time linear systems that includes all the stationary state-space linear models. Our analysis covers several scientific fields. It is only apparently confined to the linear setting and allows also to study an important set of nonlinear models. We describe fundamental examples related to epidemiology where the control input is the level of contact rate among people and the sliding surface permits to control the number of infected. For popular epidemiological models we prove the global convergence of control schemes based on the introduction of severe restrictions, like lockdowns, to contain epidemic. This greatly generalizes previous results obtained in the literature by casting them within a general sliding-mode theory.
We study a novel principle for safe and efficient collision avoidance that adopts a mathematically elegant and general framework abstracting as much as possible from the controlled vehicles dynamics and of its environment. Vehicle dynamics is characterized by pre-computed functions for accelerating and braking to a given speed. Environment is modeled by a function of time giving the free distance ahead of the controlled vehicle under the assumption that the obstacles are either fixed or are moving in the same direction. The main result is a control policy enforcing the vehicles speed so as to avoid collision and efficiently use the free distance ahead, provided some initial safety condition holds. The studied principle is applied to the design of two discrete controllers, one synchronous and another asynchronous. We show that both controllers are safe by construction. Furthermore, we show that their efficiency strictly increases for decreasing granularity of discretization. We present implementations of the two controllers, their experimental evaluation in the Carla autonomous driving simulator and investigate various performance issues.
Artificial potential fields (APFs) and their variants have been a staple for collision avoidance of mobile robots and manipulators for almost 40 years. Its model-independent nature, ease of implementation, and real-time performance have played a large role in its continued success over the years. Control barrier functions (CBFs), on the other hand, are a more recent development, commonly used to guarantee safety for nonlinear systems in real-time in the form of a filter on a nominal controller. In this paper, we address the connections between APFs and CBFs. At a theoretic level, we prove that APFs are a special case of CBFs: given a APF one obtains a CBFs, while the converse is not true. Additionally, we prove that CBFs obtained from APFs have additional beneficial properties and can be applied to nonlinear systems. Practically, we compare the performance of APFs and CBFs in the context of obstacle avoidance on simple illustrative examples and for a quadrotor, both in simulation and on hardware using onboard sensing. These comparisons demonstrate that CBFs outperform APFs.
The fundamental problem of stabilizing a general non-affine continuous-time nonlinear system is investigated via piecewise affine linear models (PALMs) in this paper. A novel integral sliding-mode parallel control (ISMPC) approach is developed, where an uncertain piecewise affine system (PWA) is constructed to model a non-affine continuous-time nonlinear system equivalently on a compact region containing the origin. A piecewise integral sliding-mode parallel controller is designed to globally stabilize the uncertain PWA and, consequently, to semi-globally stabilize the original nonlinear system. The proposed scheme enjoys two favorable features: i) some restrictions on the system input channel are eliminated, thus the developed method is more relaxed compared with the published approaches; and ii) it is convenient to be used to deal with both matched and unmatched uncertainties of the system. Moreover, we provide discussions about the universality analysis of the developed control strategy for two kinds of typical nonlinear systems. Simulation results from two numerical examples further demonstrate the performance of the developed control approach.