Thesis defense in Optimization and Systems Theory
Thursday, October 22 2009, 10.00, Room F3, Lindstedtsvägen 26
Maja Karasalo, KTH
E-mail: karasalo at math.kth.se
Data Filtering and Control Design for Mobile Robots
In this thesis, we consider problems connected to
navigation and tracking for autonomous robots under the assumption of
constraints on sensors and kinematics.
We study formation control as well as techniques for filtering and smoothing
of noise contaminated input.
The scientific contributions of the thesis comprise five papers.
In Paper A, we propose three cascaded, stabilizing formation controls for
multi-agent systems. We consider platforms with non-holonomic kinematic constraints
and directional range sensors. The resulting formation is a leader-follower system,
where each follower agent tracks its leader agent at a specified angle and distance.
No inter-agent communication is required to execute the controls.
A switching Kalman filter is introduced for active sensing, and robustness is
demonstrated in experiments and simulations with Khepera II robots.
In Paper B, an optimization-based adaptive Kalman filtering method is proposed.
The method produces an estimate of the process noise covariance matrix
$Q$ by solving an optimization problem over a short
window of data.
The algorithm recovers the observations $h(x)$ from
a system $\dot x = f(x),~y = h(x) + v$
without a priori knowledge of system dynamics.
The algorithm is evaluated in simulations and a tracking example is
included, for a target with coupled and nonlinear kinematics.
In Paper C, we consider the problem of estimating a closed curve in $\mathbb{R}^2$
based on noise contaminated samples. A recursive control theoretic smoothing
spline approach is proposed, that yields an initial estimate of the
curve and subsequently computes refinements of the estimate iteratively.
Periodic splines are generated by minimizing a cost function subject
to constraints imposed by a linear control system. The optimal control
problem is shown to be proper, and
sufficient optimality conditions are derived for a special case of
the problem using Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman theory.
Paper D continues the study of recursive control theoretic smoothing
splines. A discretization of the problem is derived, yielding
an unconstrained quadratic programming problem. A proof of
convexity for the discretized problem is provided, and the
recursive algorithm is evaluated in simulations and experiments
using a SICK laser scanner mounted on a PowerBot from
ActivMedia Robotics.
Finally, in Paper E we explore the issue of optimal smoothing for
control theoretic smoothing splines. The output of the control
theoretic smoothing spline problem is essentially a tradeoff
between faithfulness to measurement data and smoothness.
This tradeoff is regulated by the so-called \textit{smoothing parameter}.
In Paper E, a method is developed for estimating the optimal
value of this smoothing parameter.
The procedure is based on general cross validation
and requires no a priori information about the underlying
curve or level of noise in the measurements.
Calendar of seminars
Last update: September 18, 2009 by
Marie Lundin.