| 1. |
- Bergman, Kristoffer, 1990-
(author)
-
Exploiting Direct Optimal Control for Motion Planning in Unstructured Environments
- 2021
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- During the last decades, motion planning for autonomous systems has become an important area of research. The high interest is not the least due to the development of systems such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles and robotic manipulators. The objective in optimal motion planning problems is to find feasible motion plans that also optimize a performance measure. From a control perspective, the problem is an instance of an optimal control problem. This thesis addresses optimal motion planning problems for complex dynamical systems that operate in unstructured environments, where no prior reference such as road-lane information is available. Some example scenarios are autonomous docking of vessels in harbors and autonomous parking of self-driving tractor-trailer vehicles at loading sites. The focus is to develop optimal motion planning algorithms that can reliably be applied to these types of problems. This is achieved by combining recent ideas from automatic control, numerical optimization and robotics.The first contribution is a systematic approach for computing local solutions to motion planning problems in challenging unstructured environments. The solutions are computed by combining homotopy methods and direct optimal control techniques. The general principle is to define a homotopy that transforms, or preferably relaxes, the original problem to an easily solved problem. The approach is demonstrated in motion planning problems in 2D and 3D environments, where the presented method outperforms a state-of-the-art asymptotically optimal motion planner based on random sampling.The second contribution is an optimization-based framework for automatic generation of motion primitives for lattice-based motion planners. Given a family of systems, the user only needs to specify which principle types of motions that are relevant for the considered system family. Based on the selected principle motions and a selected system instance, the framework computes a library of motion primitives by simultaneously optimizing the motions and the terminal states.The final contribution of this thesis is a motion planning framework that combines the strengths of sampling-based planners with direct optimal control in a novel way. The sampling-based planner is applied to the problem in a first step using a discretized search space, where the system dynamics and objective function are chosen to coincide with those used in a second step based on optimal control. This combination ensures that the sampling-based motion planner provides a feasible motion plan which is highly suitable as warm-start to the optimal control step. Furthermore, the second step is modified such that it also can be applied in a receding-horizon fashion, where the proposed combination of methods is used to provide theoretical guarantees in terms of recursive feasibility, worst-case objective function value and convergence to the terminal state. The proposed motion planning framework is successfully applied to several problems in challenging unstructured environments for tractor-trailer vehicles. The framework is also applied and tailored for maritime navigation for vessels in archipelagos and harbors, where it is able to compute energy-efficient trajectories which complies with the international regulations for preventing collisions at sea.
|
|
| 2. |
- Simon, Daniel, 1980-
(author)
-
Fighter Aircraft Maneuver Limiting Using MPC : Theory and Application
- 2017
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Flight control design for modern fighter aircraft is a challenging task. Aircraft are dynamical systems, which naturally contain a variety of constraints and nonlinearities such as, e.g., maximum permissible load factor, angle of attack and control surface deflections. Taking these limitations into account in the design of control systems is becoming increasingly important as the performance and complexity of the aircraft is constantly increasing.The aeronautical industry has traditionally applied feedforward, anti-windup or similar techniques and different ad hoc engineering solutions to handle constraints on the aircraft. However these approaches often rely on engineering experience and insight rather than a theoretical foundation, and can often require a tremendous amount of time to tune.In this thesis we investigate model predictive control as an alternative design tool to handle the constraints that arises in the flight control design.We derive a simple reference tracking MPC algorithm for linear systems that build on the dual mode formulation with guaranteed stability and low complexity suitable for implementation in real time safety critical systems.To reduce the computational burden of nonlinear model predictive control we propose a method to handle the nonlinear constraints, using a set of dynamically generated local inner polytopic approximations. The main benefit of the proposed method is that while computationally cheap it still can guarantee recursive feasibility and convergence.An alternative to deriving MPC algorithms with guaranteed stability properties is to analyze the closed loop stability, post design. Here we focus on deriving a tool based on Mixed Integer Linear Programming for analysis of the closed loop stability and robust stability of linear systems controlled with MPC controllers.To test the performance of model predictive control for a real world example we design and implement a standard MPC controller in the development simulator for the JAS 39 Gripen aircraft at Saab Aeronautics. This part of the thesis focuses on practical and tuning aspects of designing MPC controllers for fighter aircraft. Finally we have compared the MPC design with an alternative approach to maneuver limiting using a command governor.
|
|
| 3. |
- Bergman, Kristoffer, 1990-
(author)
-
On Motion Planning Using Numerical Optimal Control
- 2019
-
Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- During the last decades, motion planning for autonomous systems has become an important area of research. The high interest is not the least due to the development of systems such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles and robotic manipulators. In this thesis, the objective is not only to find feasible solutions to a motion planning problem, but solutions that also optimize some kind of performance measure. From a control perspective, the resulting problem is an instance of an optimal control problem. In this thesis, the focus is to further develop optimal control algorithms such that they be can used to obtain improved solutions to motion planning problems. This is achieved by combining ideas from automatic control, numerical optimization and robotics.First, a systematic approach for computing local solutions to motion planning problems in challenging environments is presented. The solutions are computed by combining homotopy methods and numerical optimal control techniques. The general principle is to define a homotopy that transforms, or preferably relaxes, the original problem to an easily solved problem. The approach is demonstrated in motion planning problems in 2D and 3D environments, where the presented method outperforms both a state-of-the-art numerical optimal control method based on standard initialization strategies and a state-of-the-art optimizing sampling-based planner based on random sampling.Second, a framework for automatically generating motion primitives for lattice-based motion planners is proposed. Given a family of systems, the user only needs to specify which principle types of motions that are relevant for the considered system family. Based on the selected principle motions and a selected system instance, the algorithm not only automatically optimizes the motions connecting pre-defined boundary conditions, but also simultaneously optimizes the terminal state constraints as well. In addition to handling static a priori known system parameters such as platform dimensions, the framework also allows for fast automatic re-optimization of motion primitives if the system parameters change while the system is in use. Furthermore, the proposed framework is extended to also allow for an optimization of discretization parameters, that are are used by the lattice-based motion planner to define a state-space discretization. This enables an optimized selection of these parameters for a specific system instance.Finally, a unified optimization-based path planning approach to efficiently compute locally optimal solutions to advanced path planning problems is presented. The main idea is to combine the strengths of sampling-based path planners and numerical optimal control. The lattice-based path planner is applied to the problem in a first step using a discretized search space, where system dynamics and objective function are chosen to coincide with those used in a second numerical optimal control step. This novel tight combination of a sampling-based path planner and numerical optimal control makes, in a structured way, benefit of the former method’s ability to solve combinatorial parts of the problem and the latter method’s ability to obtain locally optimal solutions not constrained to a discretized search space. The proposed approach is shown in several practically relevant path planning problems to provide improvements in terms of computation time, numerical reliability, and objective function value.
|
|
| 4. |
- Bergman, Kristoffer, 1990-, et al.
(author)
-
An Optimization-Based Receding Horizon Trajectory Planning Algorithm
- 2020
-
In: IFAC-PapersOnLine. - : ELSEVIER. - 2405-8963. ; , s. 15550-15557
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper presents an optimization-based receding horizon trajectory planning algorithm for dynamical systems operating in unstructured and cluttered environments. The proposed approach is a two-step procedure that uses a motion planning algorithm in a first step to efficiently find a feasible, but possibly suboptimal, nominal solution to the trajectory planning problem where in particular the combinatorial aspects of the problem are solved. The resulting nominal trajectory is then improved in a second optimization-based receding horizon planning step which performs local trajectory refinement over a sliding time window. In the second step, the nominal trajectory is used in a novel way to both represent a terminal manifold and obtain an upper bound on the cost-to-go online. This enables the possibility to provide theoretical guarantees in terms of recursive feasibility, objective function value, and convergence to the desired terminal state. The established theoretical guarantees and the performance of the proposed algorithm are verified in a set of challenging trajectory planning scenarios for a truck and trailer system.
|
|
| 5. |
- Jung, Ylva, 1984-
(author)
-
Inverse system identification with applications in predistortion
- 2018
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Models are commonly used to simulate events and processes, and can be constructed from measured data using system identification. The common way is to model the system from input to output, but in this thesis we want to obtain the inverse of the system.Power amplifiers (PAs) used in communication devices can be nonlinear, and this causes interference in adjacent transmitting channels. A prefilter, called predistorter, can be used to invert the effects of the PA, such that the combination of predistorter and PA reconstructs an amplified version of the input signal. In this thesis, the predistortion problem has been investigated for outphasing power amplifiers, where the input signal is decomposed into two branches that are amplified separately by highly efficient nonlinear amplifiers and then recombined. We have formulated a model structure describing the imperfections in an outphasing \abbrPA and the matching ideal predistorter. The predistorter can be estimated from measured data in different ways. Here, the initially nonconvex optimization problem has been developed into a convex problem. The predistorters have been evaluated in measurements.The goal with the inverse models in this thesis is to use them in cascade with the systems to reconstruct the original input. It is shown that the problems of identifying a model of a preinverse and a postinverse are fundamentally different. It turns out that the true inverse is not necessarily the best one when noise is present, and that other models and structures can lead to better inversion results.To construct a predistorter (for a PA, for example), a model of the inverse is used, and different methods can be used for the estimation. One common method is to estimate a postinverse, and then using it as a preinverse, making it straightforward to try out different model structures. Another is to construct a model of the system and then use it to estimate a preinverse in a second step. This method identifies the inverse in the setup it will be used, but leads to a complicated optimization problem. A third option is to model the forward system and then invert it. This method can be understood using standard identification theory in contrast to the ones above, but the model is tuned for the forward system, not the inverse. Models obtained using the various methods capture different properties of the system, and a more detailed analysis of the methods is presented for linear time-invariant systems and linear approximations of block-oriented systems. The theory is also illustrated in examples.When a preinverse is used, the input to the system will be changed, and typically the input data will be different than the original input. This is why the estimation of preinverses is more complicated than for postinverses, and one set of experimental data is not enough. Here, we have shown that identifying a preinverse in series with the system in repeated experiments can improve the inversion performance.
|
|
| 6. |
- Ljung, Lennart, 1946-, et al.
(author)
-
Modeling and identification of dynamic systems
- 2021. - 2
-
Book (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Mathematical models of real life systems and processes are essential in today’s industrial work. To be able to construct such models is therefore a fundamental skill in modern engineering...
|
|
