A construction is given for the recovery of a disjoint union of strictly convex smooth planar obstacles from travelling-time information. The obstacles are required to be such that no Euclidean line meets more than two of them.
The paper deals with some problems related to recovering information about an obstacle in an Euclidean space from certain measurements of lengths of generalized geodesics in the exterior of the obstacle. The main result is that if two obstacles satis
fy some generic regularity conditions and have (almost) the same traveling times, then the generalized geodesic flows in their exteriors are conjugate on the non-trapping part of their phase spaces with a time preserving conjugacy. In the case of a union of two strictly convex domains in the plane, a constructive algorithm is described to recover the obstacle from traveling times.
We consider travelling times of billiard trajectories in the exterior of an obstacle K on a two-dimensional Riemannian manifold M. We prove that given two obstacles with almost the same travelling times, the generalised geodesic flows on the non-trap
ping parts of their respective phase-spaces will have a time-preserving conjugacy. Moreover, if M has non-positive sectional curvature we prove that if K and L are two obstacles with strictly convex boundaries and almost the same travelling times then K and L are identical.
Navigation tasks often cannot be defined in terms of a target, either because global position information is unavailable or unreliable or because target location is not explicitly known a priori. This task is then often defined indirectly as a source
seeking problem in which the autonomous agent navigates so as to minimize the convex potential induced by a source while avoiding obstacles. This work addresses this problem when only scalar measurements of the potential are available, i.e., without gradient information. To do so, it construct an artificial potential over which an exact gradient dynamics would generate a collision-free trajectory to the target in a world with convex obstacles. Then, leveraging extremum seeking control loops, it minimizes this artificial potential to navigate smoothly to the source location. We prove that the proposed solution not only finds the source, but does so while avoiding any obstacle. Numerical results with velocity-actuated particles, simulations with an omni-directional robot in ROS+Gazebo, and a robot-in-the-loop experiment are used to illustrate the performance of this approach.
We consider scalar lattice differential equations posed on square lattices in two space dimensions. Under certain natural conditions we show that wave-like solutions exist when obstacles (characterized by holes) are present in the lattice. Our work g
eneralizes to the discrete spatial setting the results obtained in a paper of Berestycki, Hamel and Matano for the propagation of waves around obstacles in continuous spatial domains. The analysis hinges upon the development of sub and super-solutions for a class of discrete bistable reaction-diffusion problems and on a generalization of a classical result due to Aronson and Weinberger that concerns the spreading of localized disturbances.
A classic approach in dynamical systems is to use particular geometric structures to deduce statistical properties, for example the existence of invariant measures with stochastic-like behaviour such as large deviations or decay of correlations. Such
geometric structures are generally highly non-trivial and thus a natural question is the extent to which this approach can be applied. In this paper we show that in many cases stochastic-like behaviour itself implies that the system has certain non-trivial geometric properties, which are therefore necessary as well as sufficient conditions for the occurrence of the statistical properties under consideration. As a by product of our techniques we also obtain some new results on large deviations for certain classes of systems which include Viana maps and multidimensional piecewise expanding maps.