arXiv subjects

Brett T. Lopez

Publications and source records attributed to Brett T. Lopez.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Joint On-Manifold Gravity and Accelerometer Intrinsics Estimation for Inertially Aligned Mapping

Aligning a robot's trajectory or map to the inertial frame is a critical capability that is often difficult to do accurately even though inertial measurement units (IMUs) can observe absolute roll and pitch with respect to gravity. Accelerometer biases and scale factor errors from the IMU's initial calibration are often the major source of inaccuracies when aligning the robot's odometry frame with the inertial frame, especially for low-grade IMUs. Practically, one would simultaneously estimate the true gravity vector, accelerometer biases, and scale factor to improve measurement quality but these quantities are not observable unless the IMU is sufficiently excited. While several methods estimate accelerometer bias and gravity, they do not explicitly address the observability issue nor do they estimate scale factor. We present a fixed-lag factor-graph-based estimator to address both of these issues. In addition to estimating accelerometer scale factor, our method mitigates limited observability by optimizing over a time window an order of magnitude larger than existing methods with significantly lower computational burden. The proposed method, which estimates accelerometer intrinsics and gravity separately from the other states, is enabled by a novel, velocity-agnostic measurement model for intrinsics and gravity, as well as a new method for gravity vector optimization on $S^2$. Accurate IMU state prediction, gravity-alignment, and roll/pitch drift correction are experimentally demonstrated on public and self-collected datasets in diverse environments.

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arXiv2023

Direct LiDAR-Inertial Odometry and Mapping: Perceptive and Connective SLAM

This paper presents Direct LiDAR-Inertial Odometry and Mapping (DLIOM), a robust SLAM algorithm with an explicit focus on computational efficiency, operational reliability, and real-world efficacy. DLIOM contains several key algorithmic innovations in both the front-end and back-end subsystems to design a resilient LiDAR-inertial architecture that is perceptive to the environment and produces accurate localization and high-fidelity 3D mapping for autonomous robotic platforms. Our ideas spawned after a deep investigation into modern LiDAR SLAM systems and their inabilities to generalize across different operating environments, in which we address several common algorithmic failure points by means of proactive safe-guards to provide long-term operational reliability in the unstructured real world. We detail several important innovations to localization accuracy and mapping resiliency distributed throughout a typical LiDAR SLAM pipeline to comprehensively increase algorithmic speed, accuracy, and robustness. In addition, we discuss insights gained from our ground-up approach while implementing such a complex system for real-time state estimation on resource-constrained systems, and we experimentally show the increased performance of our method as compared to the current state-of-the-art on both public benchmark and self-collected datasets.

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arXiv2023

Direct LiDAR-Inertial Odometry: Lightweight LIO with Continuous-Time Motion Correction

Aggressive motions from agile flights or traversing irregular terrain induce motion distortion in LiDAR scans that can degrade state estimation and mapping. Some methods exist to mitigate this effect, but they are still too simplistic or computationally costly for resource-constrained mobile robots. To this end, this paper presents Direct LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (DLIO), a lightweight LiDAR-inertial odometry algorithm with a new coarse-to-fine approach in constructing continuous-time trajectories for precise motion correction. The key to our method lies in the construction of a set of analytical equations which are parameterized solely by time, enabling fast and parallelizable point-wise deskewing. This method is feasible only because of the strong convergence properties in our nonlinear geometric observer, which provides provably correct state estimates for initializing the sensitive IMU integration step. Moreover, by simultaneously performing motion correction and prior generation, and by directly registering each scan to the map and bypassing scan-to-scan, DLIO's condensed architecture is nearly 20% more computationally efficient than the current state-of-the-art with a 12% increase in accuracy. We demonstrate DLIO's superior localization accuracy, map quality, and lower computational overhead as compared to four state-of-the-art algorithms through extensive tests using multiple public benchmark and self-collected datasets.

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arXiv2023

A Contracting Hierarchical Observer for Pose-Inertial Fusion

This work presents a contracting hierarchical observer that fuses position and orientation measurements with an IMU to generate smooth position, linear velocity, orientation, and IMU bias estimates that are guaranteed to converge to their true values. The proposed approach is composed of two contracting observers. The first is a quaternion-based orientation observer that also estimates gyroscope bias. The output of the orientation observer serves as an input for another contracting observer that estimates position, linear velocity, and accelerometer bias thus forming a hierarchy. We show that the proposed observer guarantees all state estimates converge to their true values. Simulation results confirm the theoretical performance guarantees.

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arXiv2022

Unmatched Control Barrier Functions: Certainty Equivalence Adaptive Safety

This work applies universal adaptive control to control barrier functions to achieve forward invariance of a safe set despite the presence of unmatched parametric uncertainties. The approach combines two ideas. The first is to construct a family of control barrier functions that ensures the system is safe for all possible models. The second is to use online parameter adaptation to methodically select a control barrier function and corresponding safety controller from the allowable set. While such a combination does not necessarily yield forward invariance without additional requirements on the barrier function, we show that such invariance can be established by simply adjusting the adaptation gain online. It is also shown that the developed method is applicable to systems with safety constraints that have a relative degree greater than one. This work thus represents the first adaptive safety approach that successfully employs the certainty equivalence principle for general state constraints without sacrificing safety guarantees.

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arXiv2022

Adaptive Variants of Optimal Feedback Policies

The stable combination of optimal feedback policies with online learning is studied in a new control-theoretic framework for uncertain nonlinear systems. The framework can be systematically used in transfer learning and sim-to-real applications, where an optimal policy learned for a nominal system needs to remain effective in the presence of significant variations in parameters. Given unknown parameters within a bounded range, the resulting adaptive control laws guarantee convergence of the closed-loop system to the state of zero cost. Online adjustment of the learning rate is used as a key stability mechanism, and preserves certainty equivalence when designing optimal policies without assuming uncertainty to be within the control range. The approach is illustrated on the familiar mountain car problem, where it yields near-optimal performance despite the presence of parametric model uncertainty.

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arXiv2022

Direct LiDAR Odometry: Fast Localization with Dense Point Clouds

Field robotics in perceptually-challenging environments require fast and accurate state estimation, but modern LiDAR sensors quickly overwhelm current odometry algorithms. To this end, this paper presents a lightweight frontend LiDAR odometry solution with consistent and accurate localization for computationally-limited robotic platforms. Our Direct LiDAR Odometry (DLO) method includes several key algorithmic innovations which prioritize computational efficiency and enables the use of dense, minimally-preprocessed point clouds to provide accurate pose estimates in real-time. This is achieved through a novel keyframing system which efficiently manages historical map information, in addition to a custom iterative closest point solver for fast point cloud registration with data structure recycling. Our method is more accurate with lower computational overhead than the current state-of-the-art and has been extensively evaluated in multiple perceptually-challenging environments on aerial and legged robots as part of NASA JPL Team CoSTAR's research and development efforts for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge.

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arXiv2021

Universal Adaptive Control of Nonlinear Systems

This work develops a new direct adaptive control framework that extends the certainty equivalence principle to general nonlinear systems with unmatched model uncertainties. The approach adjusts the rate of adaptation online to eliminate the effects of parameter estimation transients on closed-loop stability. The method can be immediately combined with a previously designed or learned feedback policy if a corresponding model-parameterized Lyapunov function or contraction metric is known. Simulation results of various nonlinear systems with unmatched uncertainties demonstrates the approach.

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arXiv2021

FASTER: Fast and Safe Trajectory Planner for Navigation in Unknown Environments

Planning high-speed trajectories for UAVs in unknown environments requires algorithmic techniques that enable fast reaction times to guarantee safety as more information about the environment becomes available. The standard approaches that ensure safety by enforcing a "stop" condition in the free-known space can severely limit the speed of the vehicle, especially in situations where much of the world is unknown. Moreover, the ad-hoc time and interval allocation scheme usually imposed on the trajectory also leads to conservative and slower trajectories. This work proposes FASTER (Fast and Safe Trajectory Planner) to ensure safety without sacrificing speed. FASTER obtains high-speed trajectories by enabling the local planner to optimize in both the free-known and unknown spaces. Safety is ensured by always having a safe back-up trajectory in the free-known space. The MIQP formulation proposed also allows the solver to choose the trajectory interval allocation. FASTER is tested extensively in simulation and in real hardware, showing flights in unknown cluttered environments with velocities up to 7.8m/s, and experiments at the maximum speed of a skid-steer ground robot (2m/s).

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arXiv2021

Unsupervised Monocular Depth Learning with Integrated Intrinsics and Spatio-Temporal Constraints

Monocular depth inference has gained tremendous attention from researchers in recent years and remains as a promising replacement for expensive time-of-flight sensors, but issues with scale acquisition and implementation overhead still plague these systems. To this end, this work presents an unsupervised learning framework that is able to predict at-scale depth maps and egomotion, in addition to camera intrinsics, from a sequence of monocular images via a single network. Our method incorporates both spatial and temporal geometric constraints to resolve depth and pose scale factors, which are enforced within the supervisory reconstruction loss functions at training time. Only unlabeled stereo sequences are required for training the weights of our single-network architecture, which reduces overall implementation overhead as compared to previous methods. Our results demonstrate strong performance when compared to the current state-of-the-art on multiple sequences of the KITTI driving dataset and can provide faster training times with its reduced network complexity.

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arXiv2021

Towards Robust State Estimation by Boosting the Maximum Correntropy Criterion Kalman Filter with Adaptive Behaviors

This work proposes a resilient and adaptive state estimation framework for robots operating in perceptually-degraded environments. The approach, called Adaptive Maximum Correntropy Criterion Kalman Filtering (AMCCKF), is inherently robust to corrupted measurements, such as those containing jumps or general non-Gaussian noise, and is able to modify filter parameters online to improve performance. Two separate methods are developed -- the Variational Bayesian AMCCKF (VB-AMCCKF) and Residual AMCCKF (R-AMCCKF) -- that modify the process and measurement noise models in addition to the bandwidth of the kernel function used in MCCKF based on the quality of measurements received. The two approaches differ in computational complexity and overall performance which is experimentally analyzed. The method is demonstrated in real experiments on both aerial and ground robots and is part of the solution used by the COSTAR team participating at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge.

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arXiv2020

Performance Analysis of Adaptive Dynamic Tube MPC

Model predictive control (MPC) is an effective method for control of constrained systems but is susceptible to the external disturbances and modeling error often encountered in real-world applications. To address these issues, techniques such as Tube MPC (TMPC) utilize an ancillary offline-generated robust controller to ensure that the system remains within an invariant set, referred to as a tube, around an online-generated trajectory. However, TMPC is unable to modify its tube and ancillary controller in response to changing state-dependent uncertainty, often resulting in overly-conservative solutions. Dynamic Tube MPC (DTMPC) addresses these problems by simultaneously optimizing the desired trajectory and tube geometry online. Building upon this framework, Adaptive DTMPC (ADTMPC) produces better model approximations by reducing model uncertainty, resulting in more accurate control policies. This work presents an experimental analysis and performance evaluation of TMPC, DTMPC, and ADTMPC for an uncertain nonlinear system. In particular, DTMPC is shown to outperform TMPC because it is able to dynamically adjust to changing environments, limiting aggressive control and conservative behavior to only the cases when the constraints and uncertainty require it. Applied to a pendulum testbed, this enables DTMPC to use up to 30% less control effort while achieving up to 80% higher speeds. This performance is further improved by ADTMPC, which reduces the feedback control effort by up to another 35%, while delivering up to 34% better trajectory tracking. This analysis establishes that the DTMPC and ADTMPC frameworks yield significantly more effective robust control policies for systems with changing uncertainty, goals, and operating conditions.

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arXiv2020

Sliding on Manifolds: Geometric Attitude Control with Quaternions

This work proposes a quaternion-based sliding variable that describes exponentially convergent error dynamics for any forward complete desired attitude trajectory. The proposed sliding variable directly operates on the non-Euclidean space formed by quaternions and explicitly handles the double covering property to enable global attitude tracking when used in feedback. In-depth analysis of the sliding variable is provided and compared to others in the literature. Several feedback controllers including nonlinear PD, robust, and adaptive sliding control are then derived. Simulation results of a rigid body with uncertain dynamics demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the approach.

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arXiv2020

Robust Adaptive Control Barrier Functions: An Adaptive & Data-Driven Approach to Safety (Extended Version)

A new framework is developed for control of constrained nonlinear systems with structured parametric uncertainties. Forward invariance of a safe set is achieved through online parameter adaptation and data-driven model estimation. The new adaptive data-driven safety paradigm is merged with a recent adaptive control algorithm for systems nominally contracting in closed-loop. This unification is more general than other safety controllers as closed-loop contraction does not require the system be invertible or in a particular form. Additionally, the approach is less expensive than nonlinear model predictive control as it does not require a full desired trajectory, but rather only a desired terminal state. The approach is illustrated on the pitch dynamics of an aircraft with uncertain nonlinear aerodynamics.

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arXiv2020

FASTER: Fast and Safe Trajectory Planner for Flights in Unknown Environments

High-speed trajectory planning through unknown environments requires algorithmic techniques that enable fast reaction times while maintaining safety as new information about the operating environment is obtained. The requirement of computational tractability typically leads to optimization problems that do not include the obstacle constraints (collision checks are done on the solutions) or use a convex decomposition of the free space and then impose an ad-hoc time allocation scheme for each interval of the trajectory. Moreover, safety guarantees are usually obtained by having a local planner that plans a trajectory with a final "stop" condition in the free-known space. However, these two decisions typically lead to slow and conservative trajectories. We propose FASTER (Fast and Safe Trajectory Planner) to overcome these issues. FASTER obtains high-speed trajectories by enabling the local planner to optimize in both the free-known and unknown spaces. Safety guarantees are ensured by always having a feasible, safe back-up trajectory in the free-known space at the start of each replanning step. Furthermore, we present a Mixed Integer Quadratic Program formulation in which the solver can choose the trajectory interval allocation, and where a time allocation heuristic is computed efficiently using the result of the previous replanning iteration. This proposed algorithm is tested extensively both in simulation and in real hardware, showing agile flights in unknown cluttered environments with velocities up to 3.6 m/s.

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arXiv2020

Dynamic Landing of an Autonomous Quadrotor on a Moving Platform in Turbulent Wind Conditions

Autonomous landing on a moving platform presents unique challenges for multirotor vehicles, including the need to accurately localize the platform, fast trajectory planning, and precise/robust control. Previous works studied this problem but most lack explicit consideration of the wind disturbance, which typically leads to slow descents onto the platform. This work presents a fully autonomous vision-based system that addresses these limitations by tightly coupling the localization, planning, and control, thereby enabling fast and accurate landing on a moving platform. The platform's position, orientation, and velocity are estimated by an extended Kalman filter using simulated GPS measurements when the quadrotor-platform distance is large, and by a visual fiducial system when the platform is nearby. The landing trajectory is computed online using receding horizon control and is followed by a boundary layer sliding controller that provides tracking performance guarantees in the presence of unknown, but bounded, disturbances. To improve the performance, the characteristics of the turbulent conditions are accounted for in the controller. The landing trajectory is fast, direct, and does not require hovering over the platform, as is typical of most state-of-the-art approaches. Simulations and hardware experiments are presented to validate the robustness of the approach.

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arXiv2020

Contraction Metrics in Adaptive Nonlinear Control

Lyapunov stability theory is the bedrock of direct adaptive control. Fundamentally, Lyapunov stability requires constructing a distance-like function which must decrease with time to ensure stability. Feedback linearization, backstepping, and sum-of-squares optimization are common approaches for constructing such a distance function, but require the system to possess certain inherent/structural properties or involves solving a non-convex optimization problem. These restrictions/complexities arise because Lyapunov stability theory relies on constructing an explicit distance function. This work uses contraction metrics to derive an adaptive controller for stabilizable nonlinear systems by constructing a distance-like function differentially rather than explicitly. Because stabilizability is in fact equivalent to the existence of a contraction metric, the proposed approach is significantly more general than available results in the literature. In particular, the method can be applied to underactuated systems. More broadly, it can also be used in transfer learning where a feedback controller has been carefully learned for a nominal system, but needs to remain effective in the presence of significant but structured variations in parameters. Simulation results illustrate the approach.

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arXiv2019

Dynamic Tube MPC for Nonlinear Systems

Modeling error or external disturbances can severely degrade the performance of Model Predictive Control (MPC) in real-world scenarios. Robust MPC (RMPC) addresses this limitation by optimizing over feedback policies but at the expense of increased computational complexity. Tube MPC is an approximate solution strategy in which a robust controller, designed offline, keeps the system in an invariant tube around a desired nominal trajectory, generated online. Naturally, this decomposition is suboptimal, especially for systems with changing objectives or operating conditions. In addition, many tube MPC approaches are unable to capture state-dependent uncertainty due to the complexity of calculating invariant tubes, resulting in overly-conservative approximations. This work presents the Dynamic Tube MPC (DTMPC) framework for nonlinear systems where both the tube geometry and open-loop trajectory are optimized simultaneously. By using boundary layer sliding control, the tube geometry can be expressed as a simple relation between control parameters and uncertainty bound; enabling the tube geometry dynamics to be added to the nominal MPC optimization with minimal increase in computational complexity. In addition, DTMPC is able to leverage state-dependent uncertainty to reduce conservativeness and improve optimization feasibility. DTMPC is demonstrated to robustly perform obstacle avoidance and modify the tube geometry in response to obstacle proximity.

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