8 accepted papers
Aerial manipulation is an emerging field in robotics with various potential applications such as transport and delivery, agriculture, and, infrastructure inspection. To deploy aerial vehicles in the real world, the safety and reliability of these systems is paramount. Motivated by the need for safet
This work develops a technique for using robot motion trajectories to create a high quality stochastic dynamics model that is then leveraged in simulation to train control policies with associated performance guarantees. We demonstrate the idea by collecting dynamics data from a 1/5 scale agile grou…
This work considers the problem of avoiding obstacles for general nonlinear systems subject to disturbances. Obstacle avoidance is achieved by computing disturbance invariant sets along a nominal trajectory and ensuring these invariant sets do not intersect with obstacles. We develop a novel techniq…
Model-based control of dynamical systems typically requires accurate domain-specific knowledge and specifications of possibly proprietary system components. In the context of autonomous driving, steering actuator dynamics can be difficult to model due to an integrated proprietary power steering cont…
This work addresses the problem of motion planning among obstacles for quadrotor platforms under external disturbances and with model uncertainty. A novel Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) optimization technique is proposed which incorporates specified uncertainties into the planned trajecto…
This work studies the design of reliable control laws of robotic systems operating in uncertain environments. We introduce a new approach to stochastic policy optimization based on probably approximately correct (PAC) bounds on the expected performance of control policies. An algorithm is constructe…
This work introduces a hybrid visual servoing technique for differentially flat, underactuated systems that is well suited for aggressive dynamics. Standard Position-Based Visual Servoing (PBVS) and Image-Based Visual Servoing (IBVS) approaches for underactuated systems, such as quadrotors, oftentim…
This paper considers pick-and-place tasks using aerial vehicles equipped with manipulators. The main focus is on the development and experimental validation of a nonlinear model-predictive control methodology to exploit the multi-body system dynamics and achieve optimized performance. At the core of…