9 accepted papers
In this paper, we present a receding-horizon, sampling-based planner capable of reasoning over multimodal policy distributions. By using the cross-entropy method to optimize a multimodal policy under a common cost function, our approach increases robustness against local minima and promotes effectiv…
Planning for multi-robot teams in complex environments is a challenging problem, especially when these teams must coordinate to accomplish a common objective. In general, optimal solutions to these planning problems are computationally intractable, since the decision space grows exponentially with t…
Achieving precise, highly-dynamic maneuvers with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a major challenge due to the complexity of the associated aerodynamics. In particular, unsteady effectsas might be experienced in post-stall regimes or during sudden vehicle morphing-can have an adverse impact on the…
We present a method for providing statistical guarantees on runtime safety and goal reachability for integrated planning and control of a class of systems with unknown nonlinear stochastic underactuated dynamics. Specifically, given a dynamics dataset, our method jointly learns a mean dynamics model…
Recent research has enabled fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to maneuver in constrained spaces through the use of direct nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) [1]. However, this approach has been limited to a priori known maps and ground truth state measurements. In this paper, we pres…
Safe and high-speed navigation is a key enabling capability for real world deployment of robotic systems. A significant limitation of existing approaches is the computational bottleneck associated with explicit mapping and the limited field of view (FOV) of existing sensor technologies. In this pape…
Fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer significant performance advantages over rotary-wing UAVs in terms of speed, endurance, and efficiency. However, these vehicles have traditionally been severely limited with regards to maneuverability. In this paper, we present a nonlinear control appr…
In this paper, we describe the design and analysis of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial-aquatic vehicle. Inspired by prior work in aerobatic post-stall maneuvers for fixed-wing vehicles [1], we explore the feasibility of executing a water-to-air transition with a fixed-wing vehicle using almost entirely…
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…