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...

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...

Planning smooth trajectories is important for the safe, efficient and comfortable operation of mobile robots, such as wheeled robots moving in crowded environments or cars moving at high speed. Asymptotically optimal sampling-based motion planners can be used to generate such trajectories. However, to achieve the necessary efficiency for the realtime operation of robots, one often uses their in...

We discuss some challenging open problems in the geometric control theory and sub-Riemannian geometry. It is getting harder to prove theorems and easier to force other people to prove them when you are sixty. Some colleagues asked me to describe interesting open problems in geometric control and sub-Riemannian geometry. Here I list few really challenging problems; some of them are open for a lo...