No Arabic abstract
This paper focuses on developing a new paradigm motivated by investigating the consensus problem of networked Lagrangian systems with time-varying delay and switching topologies. We present adaptive controllers with piecewise continuous or arbitrary times differentiable control torques for realizing consensus of Lagrangian systems, extending the results in the literature. This specific study motivates the formulation of a new paradigm referred to as forwardstepping, which is shown to be a systematic tool for solving various nonlinear control problems. One distinctive point associated with forwardstepping is that the order of the reference dynamics is typically specified to be equal to or higher than that of the original nonlinear system, and the reference dynamics and the nonlinear system are governed by a differential/dynamic-cascaded structure. The order invariance or increment of the specified reference dynamics with respect to the nonlinear system and their differential/dynamic-cascaded structure expands significantly the design freedom and thus facilitates the seeking of solutions to many nonlinear control problems which would otherwise often be intractable.
This paper investigates adaptive control of nonlinear robot manipulators with parametric uncertainty. Motivated by generating closed-loop robot dynamics with enhanced transmission capability of a reference torque and with connection to linear dynamics, we develop a new adaptive approach by exploiting forwardstepping design and inertia invariance, yielding differential-cascaded closed-loop dynamics. With the proposed approach, we propose a new class of adaptive controllers for nonlinear robot manipulators. Our particular study concerning adaptive control of robots exhibits a design methodology towards establishing the connection between adaptive control of highly nonlinear uncertain systems (e.g., with a variable inertia matrix) and linear dynamics (typically with the same or increased order), which is a long-standing intractable issue in the literature.
This paper focuses on the construction of differential-cascaded structures for control of nonlinear robot manipulators subjected to disturbances and unavailability of partial information of the desired trajectory. The proposed differential-cascaded structures rely on infinite differential series to handle the robustness with respect to time-varying disturbances and the partial knowledge of the desired trajectories for nonlinear robot manipulators. The long-standing problem of reliable adaptation in the presence of sustaining disturbances is solved by the proposed forwardstepping control with forwardstepping adaptation, and stacked reference dynamics yielding adaptive differential-cascaded structures have been proposed to facilitate the forwardstepping adaptation to both the uncertainty of robot dynamics and that of the frequencies of disturbances. A distinctive point of the proposed differential-cascaded approach is that the reference dynamics for design and analysis involve high-order quantities, but via degree-reduction implementation of the reference dynamics, the control typically involves only the low-order quantities, thus facilitating its applications to control of most physical systems. Our result relies on neither the explicit estimation of the disturbances or derivative and second derivative of the desired position nor the solutions to linear/nonlinear regulator equations, and the employed essential element is a differential-cascaded structure governing robot dynamics.
This paper proposes a specification-guided framework for control of nonlinear systems with linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications. In contrast with well-known abstraction-based methods, the proposed framework directly characterizes the winning set, i.e., the set of initial conditions from which a given LTL formula can be realized, over the continuous state space of the system via a monotonic operator. Following this characterization, an algorithm is proposed to practically approximate the operator via an adaptive interval subdivision scheme, which yields a finite-memory control strategy. We show that the proposed algorithm is sound for full LTL specifications, and robustly complete for specifications recognizable by deterministic Buchi automata (DBA), the latter in the sense that control strategies can be found whenever the given specification can be satisfied with additional bounded disturbances. Without having to compute and store the abstraction and the resulting product system with the DBA, the proposed method is more memory efficient, which is demonstrated by complexity analysis and performance tests. A pre-processing stage is also devised to reduce computational cost via a decomposition of the specification. We show that the proposed method can effectively solve real-world control problems such as jet engine compressor control and motion planning for manipulators and mobile robots.
This work studies the problem of controlling the probability density of large-scale stochastic systems, which has applications in various fields such as swarm robotics. Recently, there is a growing amount of literature that employs partial differential equations (PDEs) to model the density evolution and uses density feedback to design control laws which, by acting on individual systems, stabilize their density towards to a target profile. In spite of its stability property and computational efficiency, the success of density feedback relies on assuming the systems to be homogeneous first-order integrators (plus white noise) and ignores higher-order dynamics, making it less applicable in practice. In this work, we present a backstepping design algorithm that extends density control to heterogeneous and higher-order stochastic systems in strict-feedback forms. We show that the strict-feedback form in the individual level corresponds to, in the collective level, a PDE (of densities) distributedly driven by a collection of heterogeneous stochastic systems. The presented backstepping design then starts with a density feedback design for the PDE, followed by a sequence of stabilizing design for the remaining stochastic systems. We present a candidate control law with stability proof and apply it to nonholonomic mobile robots. A simulation is included to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.
Discrete abstractions have become a standard approach to assist control synthesis under complex specifications. Most techniques for the construction of a discrete abstraction for a continuous-time system require time-space discretization of the concrete system, which constitutes property satisfaction for the continuous-time system non-trivial. In this work, we aim at relaxing this requirement by introducing a control interface. Firstly, we connect the continuous-time uncertain concrete system with its discrete deterministic state-space abstraction with a control interface. Then, a novel stability notion called $eta$-approximate controlled globally practically stable, and a new simulation relation called robust approximate simulation relation are proposed. It is shown that the uncertain concrete system, under the condition that there exists an admissible control interface such that the augmented system (composed of the concrete system and its abstraction) can be made $eta$-approximate controlled globally practically stable, robustly approximately simulates its discrete abstraction. The effectiveness of the proposed results is illustrated by two simulation examples.