16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Article history: Accepted 10 December 2012 Available online xxxx

Many advanced robotic systems are subject to nonholonomic constraints, e.g., wheeled mobile robots, space manipulators and multifingered robot hands. Steering these mechanisms between configurations in the presence of perturbations is a difficult problem. In fact, the divide et impera strategy (first plan a trajectory, then track it by feedback) has a fundamental drawback in this case: due to t...

We investigate steering and distance computations based on linearizations about zero-control trajectories for RRT-like motion planning of highly dynamic systems. With planning constrained to dynamically feasible trajectories, the concept of “straight” is no longer Euclidean but instead determined as the path with least cost to transfer from one state to another. This additional complexity trans...

This paper works on the concept of flatness and its practical application for the design of an optimal transient controller in a synchronous machine. The feedback linearization scheme of interest requires the generation of a flat output from which the feedback control law can easily be designed. Thus the computation of the flat output for reduced order model of the synchronous machine with simp...

This paper considers solving optimization problem for linear discrete time systems such that closed-loop discrete-time system is positive (i.e., all of its state variables have non-negative values) and also finite-time stable. For this purpose, by considering a quadratic cost function, an optimal controller is designed such that in addition to minimizing the cost function, the positivity proper...

The complexity of neural dynamics stems in part from the complexity of the underlying anatomy. Yet how white matter structure constrains how the brain transitions from one cognitive state to another remains unknown. Here we address this question by drawing on recent advances in network control theory to model the underlying mechanisms of brain state transitions as elicited by the collective con...

We study the design of sampling trajectories for stable sampling and reconstruction of bandlimited spatial fields using mobile sensors. As a performance metric we use the path density of a set of sampling trajectories, defined as the total distance traveled by the moving sensors per unit spatial volume of the spatial region being monitored. We obtain new results for the problem of designing sta...

Topic: Flight Dynamics) In recent years, a number of countries have shown a growing interest towards air-launched systems [1-6]as a suitable option to perform missions devoted to the responsive coverage of specific areas [7]. Air-launched systems exhibit some practical advantages with respect to conventional ground-launchedsystems [8]. First, only a limited number of ground operatio...

We present serial and parallel algorithms for solving a system of equations that arises from the discretization of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation associated to a trajectory optimization problem of the following type. A vehicle starts at a prespecified point zo and follows a unit speed trajectory ~ ( t ) inside a region in P. until an unspecified time T that the region is exited. A trajectory mini...