Description | Speaker: Paul Reverdy Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona Title: MOTION PLANNING AND DECISION MAKING FOR AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS Time: Tuesday, June 18, 2:30 PM (Coffee/Tea, Cookies and Conversation at 2:00PM) Place: APL Hardisty Conference Center Abstract: Mobile robots are becoming increasingly ubiquitous due to technological advances in sensing, actuation, and computation. However, devising control strategies to ensure that robots perform their assigned tasks in unpredictable real-world environments remains a challenge. An approach that has proved useful in practice is to encode tasks as attractors of dynamical systems, e.g., design vector fields that steer a vehicle to a desired location. To encode richer behaviors, one can develop methods to switch among low-level point-attractor controllers; this is often done by developing an automaton that discretely switches between available controllers, yielding a hybrid dynamical system. In this work, we develop an alternative approach based on a dynamical systems mechanism for making decisions, i.e., choosing controllers. The system associates a value with each possible controller and then selects the controller with the highest value. We derive conditions under which the system exhibits a stable limit cycle which corresponds to persistently carrying out the desired tasks. We conclude the talk by discussing some more recent results integrating stochastic external stimuli into the dynamical system. |
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