A new kind of pneumatic climbing robot is presented to meet the requirements of glass-wall cleaning for high-rise buildings, which is totally actuated by pneumatic cylinders and attached to the glass wall with vacuum suckers. Using the pneumatic actuators the climbing robot can be made lightweight and dexterous. At the same time the movement driven by pneumatic actuators has the characteristic ...

A variable annuity contract with Guaranteed Minimum Withdrawal Benefit (GMWB) promises to return the entire initial investment through cash withdrawals during the policy life plus the remaining account balance at maturity, regardless of the portfolio performance. We assume that market is complete in financial risk and also there is no mortality risk (in the event of policyholder death, the cont...

In this paper we give sufficient conditions for a bang-bang regular extremal to be a strong local optimum for a control problem in the Mayer form; strong means that we consider the C0 topology in the state space. The controls appear linearly and take values in a polyhedron, and the state space and the end point constraints are finite-dimensional smooth manifolds. In the case of bang-bang extrem...

To date there have been great advances in the legged robotics community. However, these platforms are extremely costly to develop and require complex controllers perform agile motion, limiting their research well funded institutions, or purely simulation based studies. This focuses on an low cost robotic monopod platform that consists of a high powered servo motor as pneumatic actuator. Due on/...

A stochastic model predictive controller (SMPC) of air conditioning (AC) system is proposed to improve the energy efficiency of electric vehicles (EV). A Markov-chain based velocity predictor is adopted to provide a sense of the future disturbances over the SMPC control horizon. The sensitivity of electrified AC plant to solar radiation, ambient temperature and relative air flow speed is quanti...

The design of robust time-optimal controllers using the sensitivity concept is presented in this paper. A parameter optimization problem is solved using the Switch Time Optimization algorithm to determine a bang-bang control profile that minimizes the maneuver time subject to the constraint that the sensitivity of the final states with respect to system parameters are zero. The proposed approac...

Controlled gliding during descent has been thought of as a crucial intermediate step toward the evolution of powered flight in a variety of animals. Here we develop and analyse a model for the controlled descent of thin bodies in quiescent fluids. Focusing on motion in two dimensions for simplicity, we formulate the question of steering an elliptical body to a desired landing location with a sp...

An optimal control problem is studied for a predator-prey system with logistic growth rate of the prey and a prey-dependent functional response of the predator. The control function has two components and signifies the rate of mixture between the individuals of the species. The form of the optimal control is determined according to Pontryagin’s maximum principle. It is bang-bang and the number ...

Strong, fast pulses, called ‘‘bang–bang’’ controls can be used to eliminate the effects of system-environment interactions. This method for preventing errors in quantum information processors is treated here in a geometric setting which leads to an intuitive perspective. Using this geometric description, we clarify the notion of group symmetrization as an averaging technique, provide a geometri...