No Arabic abstract
Mars has been a prime candidate for planetary exploration of the solar system because of the science discoveries that support chances of future habitation on this planet. Martian caves and lava tubes like terrains, which consists of uneven ground, poor visibility and confined space, makes it impossible for wheel based rovers to navigate through these areas. In order to address these limitations and advance the exploration capability in a Martian terrain, this article presents the design and control of a novel coaxial quadrotor Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV). As it will be presented, the key contributions on the design and control architecture of the proposed Mars coaxial quadrotor, are introducing an alternative and more enhanced, from a control point of view concept, when compared in terms of autonomy to Ingenuity. Based on the presented design, the article will introduce the mathematical modelling and automatic control framework of the vehicle that will consist of a linearised model of a co-axial quadrotor and a corresponding Model Predictive Controller (MPC) for the trajectory tracking. Among the many models, proposed for the aerial flight on Mars, a reliable control architecture lacks in the related state of the art. The MPC based closed loop responses of the proposed MAV will be verified in different conditions during the flight with additional disturbances, induced to replicate a real flight scenario. In order to further validate the proposed control architecture and prove the efficacy of the suggested design, the introduced Mars coaxial quadrotor and the MPC scheme will be compared to a PID-type controller, similar to the Ingenuity helicopters control architecture for the position and the heading.
Many robotics domains use some form of nonconvex model predictive control (MPC) for planning, which sets a reduced time horizon, performs trajectory optimization, and replans at every step. The actual task typically requires a much longer horizon than is computationally tractable, and is specified via a cost function that cumulates over that full horizon. For instance, an autonomous car may have a cost function that makes a desired trade-off between efficiency, safety, and obeying traffic laws. In this work, we challenge the common assumption that the cost we optimize using MPC should be the same as the ground truth cost for the task (plus a terminal cost). MPC solvers can suffer from short planning horizons, local optima, incorrect dynamics models, and, importantly, fail to account for future replanning ability. Thus, we propose that in many tasks it could be beneficial to purposefully choose a different cost function for MPC to optimize: one that results in the MPC rollout having low ground truth cost, rather than the MPC planned trajectory. We formalize this as an optimal cost design problem, and propose a zeroth-order optimization-based approach that enables us to design optimal costs for an MPC planning robot in continuous MDPs. We test our approach in an autonomous driving domain where we find costs different from the ground truth that implicitly compensate for replanning, short horizon, incorrect dynamics models, and local minima issues. As an example, the learned cost incentivizes MPC to delay its decision until later, implicitly accounting for the fact that it will get more information in the future and be able to make a better decision. Code and videos available at https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/ocd-mpc/.
Decision making under uncertainty is critical to real-world, autonomous systems. Model Predictive Control (MPC) methods have demonstrated favorable performance in practice, but remain limited when dealing with complex probability distributions. In this paper, we propose a generalization of MPC that represents a multitude of solutions as posterior distributions. By casting MPC as a Bayesian inference problem, we employ variational methods for posterior computation, naturally encoding the complexity and multi-modality of the decision making problem. We present a Stein variational gradient descent method to estimate the posterior directly over control parameters, given a cost function and observed state trajectories. We show that this framework leads to successful planning in challenging, non-convex optimal control problems.
We present a general approach for controlling robotic systems that make and break contact with their environments: linear contact-implicit model-predictive control (LCI-MPC). Our use of differentiable contact dynamics provides a natural extension of linear model-predictive control to contact-rich settings. The policy leverages precomputed linearizations about a reference state or trajectory while contact modes, encoded via complementarity constraints, are explicitly retained, resulting in policies that can be efficiently evaluated while maintaining robustness to changes in contact timings. In many cases, the algorithm is even capable of generating entirely new contact sequences. To enable real-time performance, we devise a custom structure-exploiting linear solver for the contact dynamics. We demonstrate that the policy can respond to disturbances by discovering and exploiting new contact modes and is robust to model mismatch and unmodeled environments for a collection of simulated robotic systems, including: pushbot, hopper, quadruped, and biped.
Collision detection and recovery for aerial robots remain a challenge because of the limited space for sensors and local stability of the flight controller. We introduce a novel collision-resilient quadrotor that features a compliant arm design to enable free flight while allowing for one passive degree of freedom to absorb shocks. We further propose a novel collision detection and characterization method based on Hall sensors, as well as a new recovery control method to generate and track a smooth trajectory after a collision occurs. Experimental results demonstrate that the robot can detect and recover from high-speed collisions with various obstacles such as walls and poles. Moreover, it can survive collisions that are hard to detect with existing methods based on IMU data and contact models, for example, when colliding with unstructured surfaces, or being hit by a moving obstacle while hovering.
Autonomous missions of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are prone to collisions owing to environmental disturbances and localization errors. Consequently, a UAV that can endure collisions and perform recovery control in critical aerial missions is desirable to prevent loss of the vehicle and/or payload. We address this problem by proposing a novel foldable quadrotor system which can sustain collisions and recover safely. The quadrotor is designed with integrated mechanical compliance using a torsional spring such that the impact time is increased and the net impact force on the main body is decreased. The post-collision dynamics is analysed and a recovery controller is proposed which stabilizes the system to a hovering location without additional collisions. Flight test results on the proposed and a conventional quadrotor demonstrate that for the former, integrated spring-damper characteristics reduce the rebound velocity and lead to simple recovery control algorithms in the event of unintended collisions as compared to a rigid quadrotor of the same dimension.