In this contribution, we suggest two proposals to achieve fast, real-time lane-keeping control for Autonomous Ground Vehicles (AGVs). The goal of lane-keeping is to orient and keep the vehicle within ...a given reference path using the front wheel steering angle as the control action for a specific longitudinal velocity. While nonlinear models can describe the lateral dynamics of the vehicle in an accurate manner, they might lead to difficulties when computing some control laws such as Model Predictive Control (MPC) in real time. Therefore, our first proposal is to use a Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) model to describe the AGV's lateral dynamics, as a trade-off between computational complexity and model accuracy. Additionally, AGV sensors typically work at different measurement acquisition frequencies so that Kalman Filters (KFs) are usually needed for sensor fusion. Our second proposal is to use a Dual-Rate Extended Kalman Filter (DREFKF) to alleviate the cost of updating the internal state of the filter. To check the validity of our proposals, an LPV model-based control strategy is compared in simulations over a circuit path to another reduced computational complexity control strategy, the Inverse Kinematic Bicycle model (IKIBI), in the presence of process and measurement Gaussian noise. The LPV-MPC controller is shown to provide a more accurate lane-keeping behavior than an IKIBI control strategy. Finally, it is seen that Dual-Rate Extended Kalman Filters (DREKFs) constitute an interesting tool for providing fast vehicle state estimation in an AGV lane-keeping application.
In this paper, Safety Control Barrier Functions (SCBFs) were used to adjust the null-space compliant behavior of a redundant robot to improve safety in Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) without ...modifying the robot behavior with respect to its main Cartesian task. A Lyapunov function was included in an energy storage formulation compatible with strict passivity to provide global asymptotic stability guarantees for the null-space compliance variation, and the necessary conditions for stability were formulated as inequality constraints of the optimization problem used for the null-space compliance variation. Experimental validation was performed using a Franka Emika Panda robot for a collaborative assembly application and its results showed that safety can be improved by using SCBFs simultaneously to the optimization of the robot configuration, while employing a single degree of freedom.
Collaborative robots have been designed to per-form tasks where human cooperation may occur. Additionally, undesired collisions can happen in the robot's environment. A contact classifier may be ...needed if robot trajectory recalculation is to be activated depending on the source of robot-environment contact. For this reason, we have evaluated a fast contact detection and classification method and we propose necessary modifications and extensions so that it is able to detect a contact in any direction and distinguish if it has been caused by voluntary human cooperation or by accidental collision with a static obstacle for kinesthetic teaching applications. Robot compliance control is used for trajectory following as an active strategy to ensure safety of the robot and its environment. Only sensor data that are conventionally available in commercial collaborative robots, such as joint-torque sensors and joint-position encoders/resolvers, are used in our method. Moreover, fast contact detection is ensured by using the frequency content of the estimated external forces, whereas external force direction and sense relative to the robot's motion is used to classify its source. Our method has been experimentally proven to be successful in a collaborative assembly task for a number of different experimentally recorded trajectories and with the intervention of different operators.
Model Predictive Control (MPC) is an efficient point-to-point trajectory-generation method for robots that can be used in situations that occur under time constraints. The motion plan can be ...recalculated online to increase the accuracy of the trajectory when getting close to the goal position. We have implemented this strategy in a Franka Emika Panda robot, a redundant collaborative robot, by extending previous research that was performed on a 6-DOF robot. We have also used null-space motion to ensure a continuous movement of all joints during the entire trajectory execution as an approach to avoid joint stiction and allow accurate kinesthetic teaching. As is conventional for collaborative and industrial robots, the Panda robot is equipped with an internal controller, which allows to send position and velocity references directly to the robot. Therefore, null-space motion can be added directly to the MPC-generated velocity references. The observed trajectory deviation caused by discretization approximations of the Jacobian matrix when implementing null-space motion has been corrected experimentally using sensor feedback for the real-time velocity-reference recalculation and by performing a fast sampling of the null-space vector. Null-space motion has been experimentally seen to contribute to reducing the friction torque dispersion present in static joints.
Cartesian impedance control is a type of motion control strategy for robots that improves safety in partially unknown environments by achieving a compliant behavior of the robot with respect to its ...external forces. This compliant robot behavior has the added benefit of allowing physical human guidance of the robot. In this paper, we propose a C++ implementation of compliance control valid for any torque-commanded robotic manipulator. The proposed controller implements Cartesian impedance control to track a desired end-effector pose. Additionally, joint impedance is projected in the nullspace of the Cartesian robot motion to track a desired robot joint configuration without perturbing the Cartesian motion of the robot. The proposed implementation also allows the robot to apply desired forces and torques to its environment. Several safety features such as filtering, rate limiting, and saturation are included in the proposed implementation. The core functionalities are in a re-usable base library and a Robot Operating System (ROS) ros_control integration is provided on top of that. The implementation was tested with the KUKA LBR iiwa robot and the Franka Emika Robot (Panda) both in simulation and with the physical robots.
Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) models can be used to describe the vehicular lateral dynamic behavior of self-driving cars. They are particularly suitable for model-based control schemes such as model ...predictive control (MPC) applied to real-time trajectory tracking control, since they provide a proper trade-off between accuracy in different scenarios and reduced computation cost compared to nonlinear models. The MPC control schemes use the model for a long prediction horizon of the states, therefore prediction errors for a long time horizon should be minimized in order to increase the accuracy of the tracking. For this task, this work presents a system identification procedure for the lateral dynamics of a vehicle that combines a LPV model with a learning algorithm that has been successfully applied to other dynamic systems in the past. Simulation results show the benefits of the identified model in comparison to other well-known vehicular lateral dynamic models.
Kinesthetic teaching allows human operators to reprogram part of a robot's trajectory by manually guiding the robot. To allow kinesthetic teaching, and also to avoid any harm to both the robot and ...its environment, Cartesian impedance control is here used for trajectory following. In this paper, we present an online method to modify the compliant behavior of a robot toward its environment, so that undesired parts of the robot's workspace are avoided during kinesthetic teaching. The stability of the method is guaranteed by a well-known passivity-based energy-storage formulation that has been modified to include a strict Lyapunov function, i.e., its time derivative is a globally negative-definite function. Safety Control Barrier Functions (SCBFs) that consider the rigid-body dynamics of the robot are formulated as inequality constraints of a quadratic optimization (QP) problem to ensure forward invariance of the robot's states in a safe set. An experimental evaluation using a Franka Emika Panda robot is provided.
Cartesian impedance control is a type of motion control strategy for robots that improves safety in partially unknown environments by achieving a compliant behavior of the robot with respect to its ...external forces. This compliant robot behavior has the added benefit of allowing physical human guidance of the robot. In this paper, we propose a C++ implementation of compliance control valid for any torque-commanded robotic manipulator. The proposed controller implements Cartesian impedance control to track a desired end-effector pose. Additionally, joint impedance is projected in the nullspace of the Cartesian robot motion to track a desired robot joint configuration without perturbing the Cartesian motion of the robot. The proposed implementation also allows the robot to apply desired forces and torques to its environment. Several safety features such as filtering, rate limiting, and saturation are included in the proposed implementation. The core functionalities are in a re-usable base library and a Robot Operating System (ROS) ros_control integration is provided on top of that. The implementation was tested with the KUKA LBR iiwa robot and the Franka Emika Robot (Panda) both in simulation and with the physical robots.
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