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- Malmström, Magnus, 1994-
(författare)
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Uncertainties in Neural Networks : A System Identification Approach
- 2021
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In science, technology, and engineering, creating models of the environment to predict future events has always been a key component. The models could be everything from how the friction of a tire depends on the wheels slip to how a pathogen is spread throughout society. As more data becomes available, the use of data-driven black-box models becomes more attractive. In many areas they have shown promising results, but for them to be used widespread in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving some notion of uncertainty in the prediction is required.An example of such a black-box model is neural networks (NNs). This thesis aims to increase the usefulness of NNs by presenting an method where uncertainty in the prediction is obtained by linearization of the model. In system identification and sensor fusion, under the condition that the model structure is identifiable, this is a commonly used approach to get uncertainty in the prediction from a nonlinear model. If the model structure is not identifiable, such as for NNs, the ambiguities that cause this have to be taken care of in order to make the approach applicable. This is handled in the first part of the thesis where NNs are analyzed from a system identification perspective, and sources of uncertainty are discussed.Another problem with data-driven black-box models is that it is difficult to know how flexible the model needs to be in order to correctly model the true system. One solution to this problem is to use a model that is more flexible than necessary to make sure that the model is flexible enough. But how would that extra flexibility affect the uncertainty in the prediction? This is handled in the later part of the thesis where it is shown that the uncertainty in the prediction is bounded from below by the uncertainty in the prediction of the model with lowest flexibility required for representing true system accurately. In the literature, many other approaches to handle the uncertainty in predictions by NNs have been suggested, of which some are summarized in this work. Furthermore, a simulation and an experimental studies inspired by autonomous driving are conducted. In the simulation study, different sources of uncertainty are investigated, as well as how large the uncertainty in the predictions by NNs are in areas without training data. In the experimental study, the uncertainty in predictions done by different models are investigated. The results show that, compared to existing methods, the linearization method produces similar results for the uncertainty in predictions by NNs.An introduction video is available at https://youtu.be/O4ZcUTGXFN0
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| 2. |
- Ljungqvist, Oskar, 1990-
(författare)
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On motion planning and control for truck and trailer systems
- 2019
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the last decades, improved sensor and hardware technologies as well as new methods and algorithms have made self-driving vehicles a realistic possibility in the near future. Thanks to this technology enhancement, many leading automotive and technology companies have turned their attention towards developing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and self-driving vehicles. Autonomous vehicles are expected to have their first big impact in closed areas, such as mines, harbors and loading/offloading sites. In such areas, the legal requirements are less restrictive and the surrounding environment is more controlled and predictable compared to urban areas. Expected positive outcomes include increased productivity and safety, reduced emissions and the possibility to relieve the human from performing complex or dangerous tasks. Within these sites, different truck and trailer systems are used to transport materials. These systems are composed of several interconnected modules, and are thus large and highly unstable while reversing. This thesis addresses the problem of designing efficient motion planning and feedback control frameworks for such systems.First, a cascade controller for a reversing truck with a dolly-steered trailer is presented. The unstable modes of the system is stabilized around circular equilibrium configurations using a gain-scheduled linear quadratic (LQ) controller together with a higher-level pure pursuit controller to enable path following of piecewise linear reference paths. The cascade controller is then used within a rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) framework and the complete motion planning and control framework is demonstrated on a small-scale test vehicle.Second, a path following controller for a reversing truck with a dolly-steered trailer is proposed for the case when the obtained motion plan is kinematically feasible. The control errors of the system are modeled in terms of their deviation from the nominal path and a stabilizing LQ controller with feedforward action is designed based on the linearization of the control error model. Stability of the closed-loop system is proven by combining global optimization, theory from linear differential inclusions and linear matrix inequality techniques.Third, a systematic framework is presented for analyzing stability of the closed-loop system consisting of a controlled vehicle and a feedback controller, executing a motion plan computed by a lattice planner. When this motion planner is considered, it is shown that the closed-loop system can be modeled as a nonlinear hybrid system. Based on this, a novel method is presented for analyzing the behavior of the tracking error, how to design the feedback controller and how to potentially impose constraints on the motion planner in order to guarantee that the tracking error is bounded and decays towards zero.Fourth, a complete motion planning and control solution for a truck with a dolly-steered trailer is presented. A lattice-based motion planner is proposed, where a novel parametrization of the vehicle’s state-space is proposed to improve online planning time. A time-symmetry result is established that enhance the numerical stability of the numerical optimal control solver used for generating the motion primitives. Moreover, a nonlinear observer for state estimation is developed which only utilizes information from sensors that are mounted on the truck, making the system independent of additional trailer sensors. The proposed framework is implemented on a full-scale truck with a dolly-steered trailer and results from a series of field experiments are presented.
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