Supervisory control of unmanned systems presents challenges to users at several levels in the military hierarchy. The UV operator has to control and supervise multiple assets, commanders need to quickly extract information, and allocation of vehicles to different clients involved in the mission is an additional demand. Such tasks may have an impact on task load, task switching, selective attent...

In this chapter a new systematic switching control approach to adaptive stabilization of uncertain discrete-time systems with parametric uncertainty is presented. Our approach is based on a localization method which is conceptually diierent from supervisory adaptive control schemes and other existing switching adaptive schemes. Our approach allows for slow parameter drifting, infrequent large p...

In this paper we propose a method to create discrete abstraction of state space behavior for continuous-time systems based on gradient analysis of the system dynamics. Then we describe how to use such a discrete model to design a supervisory controller for a given safety spiflication for the system. Finally we provide an entropy measure of nondeterminism, which can be used to evaluate the quali...

In presence of large uncertainty, traditional methodologies based on a single controller do not provide, in general, satisfactory performance when applied to any system in the uncertainty set, and may not even guarantee stability. A way to address this problem is to consider a set of candidate controllers and design a supervisor that appropriately orchestrates the switching among them, based on...

The purpose of this paper is to describe a self-adjusting, vision-based controller which is able to control the position of a robotic manipulator without explicit calibration of camera parameters. The control strategy is based on the concepts of cyclic switching (Pait 1993) and dwell-time switching (Morse 1995a). With these techniques, it is possible to design and implement a supervisory contro...

We address the problem of controlling a linear system with unknown parameters ranging over a continuum by means of switching among a 4nite family of candidate controllers. We present a new hysteresis-based switching logic, designed speci4cally for this purpose, and derive a bound on the number of switches produced by this logic on an arbitrary time interval. The resulting switching control algo...

When the process is highly uncertain, even linear minimum phase systems must sacrifice desirable feedback control benefits to avoid an excessive ‘cost of feedback’, while preserving the robust stability. In this paper, the control structure of supervisory based switching Quantitative Feedback Theory (QFT) control is proposed to control highly uncertain plants. According to this strategy, the un...

A switching controller for a class of robotic manipulators with grasping capabilities is presented. The aim is to control the motion of the grasped object along a desired trajectory while complying with contact force constraints. The algorithm successfully performs its control task by switching between several controllers induced by different operating conditions of the manipulator–object syste...