arXiv subjects

Mo Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Mo Chen.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Safe and Resilient Multi-vehicle Trajectory Planning Under Adversarial Intruder

Provably safe and scalable multi-vehicle trajectory planning is an important and urgent problem. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is an ideal tool for analyzing such safety-critical systems and has been successfully applied to several small-scale problems. However, a direct application of HJ reachability to multi-vehicle trajectory planning is often intractable due to the "curse of dimensionality." To overcome this problem, the sequential trajectory planning (STP) method, which assigns strict priorities to vehicles, was proposed, STP allows multi-vehicle trajectory planning to be done with a linearly-scaling computation complexity. However, if a vehicle not in the set of STP vehicles enters the system, or even worse, if this vehicle is an adversarial intruder, the previous formulation requires the entire system to perform replanning, an intractable task for large-scale systems. In this paper, we make STP more practical by providing a new algorithm where replanning is only needed only for a fixed number of vehicles, irrespective of the total number of STP vehicles. Moreover, this number is a design parameter, which can be chosen based on the computational resources available during run time. We demonstrate this algorithm in a representative simulation of an urban airspace environment.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2017

Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability: A Brief Overview and Recent Advances

Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability analysis is an important formal verification method for guaranteeing performance and safety properties of dynamical systems; it has been applied to many small-scale systems in the past decade. Its advantages include compatibility with general nonlinear system dynamics, formal treatment of bounded disturbances, and the availability of well-developed numerical tools. The main challenge is addressing its exponential computational complexity with respect to the number of state variables. In this tutorial, we present an overview of basic HJ reachability theory and provide instructions for using the most recent numerical tools, including an efficient GPU-parallelized implementation of a Level Set Toolbox for computing reachable sets. In addition, we review some of the current work in high-dimensional HJ reachability to show how the dimensionality challenge can be alleviated via various general theoretical and application-specific insights.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2017

Decomposition of Reachable Sets and Tubes for a Class of Nonlinear Systems

Reachability analysis provides formal guarantees for performance and safety properties of nonlinear control systems. Here, one aims to compute the backward reachable set (BRS) or tube (BRT) -- the set of states from which the system can be driven into a target set at a particular time or within a time interval, respectively. The computational complexity of current approaches scales exponentially, making application to high-dimensional systems intractable. We propose a technique that decomposes the dynamics of a general class of nonlinear systems into subsystems which may be coupled through common states, controls, and disturbances. Despite this coupling, BRSs and BRTs can be computed efficiently using our technique without incurring additional approximation errors and without the need for linearizing dynamics or approximating sets as polytopes. Computations of BRSs and BRTs now become orders of magnitude faster, and for the first time BRSs and BRTs for many high-dimensional nonlinear control systems can be computed using the Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) formulation. In situations involving bounded adversarial disturbances, our proposed method can obtain slightly conservative results. We demonstrate our theory by numerically computing BRSs and BRTs using the HJ formulation for several systems, including the 6D Acrobatic Quadrotor and the 10D Near-Hover Quadrotor.

math.OC↗

arXiv2017

Safe Sequential Path Planning Under Disturbances and Imperfect Information

Multi-UAV systems are safety-critical, and guarantees must be made to ensure no unsafe configurations occur. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is ideal for analyzing such safety-critical systems; however, its direct application is limited to small-scale systems of no more than two vehicles due to an exponentially-scaling computational complexity. Previously, the sequential path planning (SPP) method, which assigns strict priorities to vehicles, was proposed; SPP allows multi-vehicle path planning to be done with a linearly-scaling computational complexity. However, the previous formulation assumed that there are no disturbances, and that every vehicle has perfect knowledge of higher-priority vehicles' positions. In this paper, we make SPP more practical by providing three different methods to account for disturbances in dynamics and imperfect knowledge of higher-priority vehicles' states. Each method has different assumptions about information sharing. We demonstrate our proposed methods in simulations.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2017

Provably Safe and Robust Drone Routing via Sequential Path Planning: A Case Study in San Francisco and the Bay Area

Provably safe and scalable multi-vehicle path planning is an important and urgent problem due to the expected increase of automation in civilian airspace in the near future. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is an ideal tool for analyzing such safety-critical systems and has been successfully applied to several small-scale problems. However, a direct application of HJ reachability to large scale systems is often intractable because of its exponentially-scaling computation complexity with respect to system dimension, also known as the "curse of dimensionality". To overcome this problem, the sequential path planning (SPP) method, which assigns strict priorities to vehicles, was previously proposed; SPP allows multi-vehicle path planning to be done with a linearly-scaling computation complexity. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of SPP algorithm for large-scale systems. In particular, we simulate large-scale multi-vehicle systems in two different urban environments, a city environment and a multi-city environment, and use the SPP algorithm for trajectory planning. SPP is able to efficiently design collision-free trajectories in both environments despite the presence of disturbances in vehicles' dynamics. To ensure a safe transition of vehicles to their destinations, our method automatically allocates space-time reservations to vehicles while accounting for the magnitude of disturbances such as wind in a provably safe way. Our simulation results show an intuitive multi-lane structure in airspace, where the number of lanes and the distance between the lanes depend on the size of disturbances and other problem parameters.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2017

Fast Reachable Set Approximations via State Decoupling Disturbances

With the recent surge of interest in using robotics and automation for civil purposes, providing safety and performance guarantees has become extremely important. In the past, differential games have been successfully used for the analysis of safety-critical systems. In particular, the Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) formulation of differential games provides a flexible way to compute the reachable set, which can characterize the set of states which lead to either desirable or undesirable configurations, depending on the application. While HJ reachability is applicable to many small practical systems, the curse of dimensionality prevents the direct application of HJ reachability to many larger systems. To address computation complexity issues, various efficient computation methods in the literature have been developed for approximating or exactly computing the solution to HJ partial differential equations, but only when the system dynamics are of specific forms. In this paper, we propose a flexible method to trade off optimality with computation complexity in HJ reachability analysis. To achieve this, we propose to simplify system dynamics by treating state variables as disturbances. We prove that the resulting approximation is conservative in the desired direction, and demonstrate our method using a four-dimensional plane model.

math.OC↗

arXiv2017

Using Neural Networks to Compute Approximate and Guaranteed Feasible Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman PDE Solutions

To sidestep the curse of dimensionality when computing solutions to Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman partial differential equations (HJB PDE), we propose an algorithm that leverages a neural network to approximate the value function. We show that our final approximation of the value function generates near optimal controls which are guaranteed to successfully drive the system to a target state. Our framework is not dependent on state space discretization, leading to a significant reduction in computation time and space complexity in comparison with dynamic programming-based approaches. Using this grid-free approach also enables us to plan over longer time horizons with relatively little additional computation overhead. Unlike many previous neural network HJB PDE approximating formulations, our approximation is strictly conservative and hence any trajectories we generate will be strictly feasible. For demonstration, we specialize our new general framework to the Dubins car model and discuss how the framework can be applied to other models with higher-dimensional state spaces.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

A Hybrid Framework for Multi-Vehicle Collision Avoidance

With the recent surge of interest in UAVs for civilian services, the importance of developing tractable multi-agent analysis techniques that provide safety and performance guarantees have drastically increased. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability has successfully provided these guarantees to small-scale systems and is flexible in terms of system dynamics. However, the exponential complexity scaling of HJ reachability with respect to system dimension prevents its direct application to larger-scale problems where the number of vehicles is greater than two. In this paper, we propose a collision avoidance algorithm using a hybrid framework for N+1 vehicles through higher-level control logic given any N-vehicle collision avoidance algorithm. Our algorithm conservatively approximates a guaranteed-safe region in the joint state space of the N+1 vehicles and produces a safety-preserving controller. In addition, our algorithm does not incur significant additional computation cost. We demonstrate our proposed method in simulation.

math.OC↗

arXiv2017

Reachability-Based Safety and Goal Satisfaction of Unmanned Aerial Platoons on Air Highways

Recently, there has been immense interest in using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for civilian operations. As a result, unmanned aerial systems traffic management is needed to ensure the safety and goal satisfaction of potentially thousands of UAVs flying simultaneously. Currently, the analysis of large multi-agent systems cannot tractably provide these guarantees if the agents' set of maneuvers is unrestricted. In this paper, platoons of UAVs flying on air highways is proposed to impose an airspace structure that allows for tractable analysis. For the air highway placement problem, the fast marching method is used to produce a sequence of air highways that minimizes the cost of flying from an origin to any destination. The placement of air highways can be updated in real-time to accommodate sudden airspace changes. Within platoons traveling on air highways, each vehicle is modeled as a hybrid system. Using Hamilton-Jacobi reachability, safety and goal satisfaction are guaranteed for all mode transitions. For a single altitude range, the proposed approach guarantees safety for one safety breach per vehicle, in the unlikely event of multiple safety breaches, safety can be guaranteed over multiple altitude ranges. We demonstrate the platooning concept through simulations of three representative scenarios.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2016

Robust Sequential Path Planning Under Disturbances and Adversarial Intruder

Provably safe and scalable multi-vehicle path planning is an important and urgent problem due to the expected increase of automation in civilian airspace in the near future. Although this problem has been studied in the past, there has not been a method that guarantees both goal satisfaction and safety for vehicles with general nonlinear dynamics while taking into account disturbances and potential adversarial agents, to the best of our knowledge. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is the ideal tool for guaranteeing goal satisfaction and safety under such scenarios, and has been successfully applied to many small-scale problems. However, a direct application of HJ reachability in most cases becomes intractable when there are more than two vehicles due to the exponentially scaling computational complexity with respect to system dimension. In this paper, we take advantage of the guarantees HJ reachability provides, and eliminate the computation burden by assigning a strict priority ordering to the vehicles under consideration. Under this sequential path planning (SPP) scheme, vehicles reserve "space-time" portions in the airspace, and the space-time portions guarantee dynamic feasibility, collision avoidance, and optimality of the paths given the priority ordering. With a computation complexity that scales quadratically when accounting for both disturbances and an intruder, and linearly when accounting for only disturbances, SPP can tractably solve the multi-vehicle path planning problem for vehicles with general nonlinear dynamics in a practical setting. We demonstrate our theory in representative simulations.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2016

Multiplayer Reach-Avoid Games via Pairwise Outcomes

A multiplayer reach-avoid game is a differential game between an attacking team with NA attackers and a defending team with ND defenders playing on a compact domain with obstacles. The attacking team aims to send M of the NA attackers to some target location, while the defending team aims to prevent that by capturing attackers or indefinitely delaying attackers from reaching the target. Although the analysis of this game plays an important role in many applications, the optimal solution to this game is computationally intractable when NA>1 or ND>1. In this paper, we present two approaches for the NA=ND=1 case to determine pairwise outcomes, and a graph theoretic maximum matching approach to merge these pairwise outcomes for an NA,ND>1 solution that provides guarantees on the performance of the defending team. We will show that the four-dimensional Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs approach allows for real-time updates to the maximum matching, and that the two-dimensional "path defense" approach is considerably more scalable with the number of players while maintaining defender performance guarantees.

math.OC↗

arXiv2016

Multi-Vehicle Collision Avoidance via Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability and Mixed Integer Programming

Multi-agent differential games are important and useful tools for analyzing many practical problems. With the recent surge of interest in using UAVs for civil purposes, the importance and urgency of developing tractable multi-agent analysis techniques that provide safety and performance guarantees is at an all-time high. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability has successfully provided safety guarantees to small-scale systems and is flexible in terms of system dynamics. However, the exponential complexity scaling of HJ reachability prevents its direct application to large scale problems when the number of vehicles is greater than two. In this paper, we overcome the scalability limitations of HJ reachability by using a mixed integer program that exploits the properties of HJ solutions to provide higher-level control logic. Our proposed method provides safety guarantee for three-vehicle systems -- a previously intractable task for HJ reachability -- without incurring significant additional computation cost. Furthermore, our method is scalable beyond three vehicles and performs significantly better by several metrics than an extension of pairwise collision avoidance to multi-vehicle collision avoidance. We demonstrate our proposed method in simulations.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2016

Exact and Efficient Hamilton-Jacobi-based Guaranteed Safety Analysis via System Decomposition

Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is a method that provides rigorous analyses of the safety properties of dynamical systems. This method has been successfully applied to many low-dimensional dynamical system models such as coarse models of aircraft and quadrotors in order to provide safety guarantees in potentially dangerous scenarios. These guarantees can be provided by the computation of a backward reachable set (BRS), which represents the set of states from which the system may be driven into violating safety properties despite the system's best effort to remain safe. Unfortunately, HJ reachability is not practical for high-dimensional systems because the complexity of the BRS computation scales exponentially with the number of state dimensions. Although numerous approximation techniques are able to tractably provide conservative estimates of the BRS, they often require restrictive assumptions about system dynamics without providing an exact solution. In this paper we propose a general method for decomposing dynamical systems. Even when the resulting subsystems are coupled, relatively high-dimensional BRSs that were previously intractable or expensive to compute can now be quickly and exactly computed in lower-dimensional subspaces. As a result, the curse of dimensionality is alleviated to a large degree without sacrificing optimality. We demonstrate our theoretical results through two numerical examples: a 3D Dubins Car model and a 6D Acrobatic Quadrotor model.

math.OC↗

arXiv2016

Safe Sequential Path Planning of Multi-Vehicle Systems via Double-Obstacle Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs Variational Inequality

We consider the problem of planning trajectories for a group of $N$ vehicles, each aiming to reach its own target set while avoiding danger zones of other vehicles. The analysis of problems like this is extremely important practically, especially given the growing interest in utilizing unmanned aircraft systems for civil purposes. The direct solution of this problem by solving a single-obstacle Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs (HJI) variational inequality (VI) is numerically intractable due to the exponential scaling of computation complexity with problem dimensionality. Furthermore, the single-obstacle HJI VI cannot directly handle situations in which vehicles do not have a common scheduled arrival time. Instead, we perform sequential path planning by considering vehicles in order of priority, modeling higher-priority vehicles as time-varying obstacles for lower-priority vehicles. To do this, we solve a double-obstacle HJI VI which allows us to obtain the reach-avoid set, defined as the set of states from which a vehicle can reach its target while staying within a time-varying state constraint set. From the solution of the double-obstacle HJI VI, we can also extract the latest start time and the optimal control for each vehicle. This is a first application of the double-obstacle HJI VI which can handle systems with time-varying dynamics, target sets, and state constraint sets, and results in computation complexity that scales linearly, as opposed to exponentially, with the number of vehicles in consideration.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2016

Safe Platooning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles via Reachability

Recently, there has been immense interest in using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for civilian operations such as package delivery, firefighting, and fast disaster response. As a result, UAV traffic management systems are needed to support potentially thousands of UAVs flying simultaneously in the airspace, in order to ensure their liveness and safety requirements are met. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is a powerful framework for providing conditions under which these requirements can be met, and for synthesizing the optimal controller for meeting them. However, due to the curse of dimensionality, HJ reachability is only tractable for a small number of vehicles if their set of maneuvers is unrestricted. In this paper, we define a platoon to be a group of UAVs in a single-file formation. We model each vehicle as a hybrid system with modes corresponding to its role in the platoon, and specify the set of allowed maneuvers in each mode to make the analysis tractable. We propose several liveness controllers based on HJ reachability, and wrap a safety controller, also based on HJ reachability, around the liveness controllers. For a single altitude range, our approach guarantees safety for one safety breach; in the unlikely event of multiple safety breaches, safety can be guaranteed over multiple altitude ranges. We demonstrate the satisfaction of liveness and safety requirements through simulations of three common scenarios.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2016

Exact and Efficient Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability for Decoupled Systems

Reachability analysis is important for studying optimal control problems and differential games, which are powerful theoretical tools for analyzing and modeling many practical problems in robotics, aircraft control, among other application areas. In reachability analysis, one is interested in computing the reachable set, defined as the set of states from which there exists a control, despite the worst disturbance, that can drive the system into a set of target states. The target states can be used to model either unsafe or desirable configurations, depending on the application. Many Hamilton-Jacobi formulations allow the computation of reachable sets; however, due to the exponential complexity scaling in computation time and space, problems involving approximately 5 dimensions become intractable. A number of methods that compute an approximate solution exist in the literature, but these methods trade off complexity for optimality. In this paper, we eliminate complexity-optimality trade-offs for time-invariant decoupled systems using a decoupled Hamilton-Jacobi formulation that enables the exact reconstruction of high dimensional solutions via low dimensional solutions of the decoupled subsystems. Our formulation is compatible with existing numerical tools, and we show the accuracy, computation benefits, and an application of our novel approach using two numerical examples.

math.OC↗

arXiv2015

Ultralong Faraday laser as an optical frequency standard

In this letter, we introduce the concept and experimentally demonstrate an ultralong Faraday laser as an optical frequency standard in principle. The ultralong Faraday laser is based on the Faraday anomalous dispersion optical filter (FADOF) with ultra-narrow bandwidth and the ultralong fiber extended cavity of $800$ m. The ultra-narrow FADOF is based on atomic transition line of isotope $^{87}$Rb, which has an ultra-narrow bandwidth of $26.0$ MHz and a transmission of $23.6\%$ at $780$ nm. Fibers of length $150$ m and $800$ m are used as ultralong fiber extended cavities, which provide optical feedback and give extremely small FSR of $0.667$ MHz and $0.125$ MHz, respectively. The mechanism of the proposed ultralong Faraday laser is to combine FADOF's ultra-narrow bandwidth and ultralong cavity's small free spectral range to limit the lasing frequency within FADOF bandwidth covered by the semiconductor gain. The active lasing frequency of the ultralong Faraday laser is determined by the center frequency of FADOF transmission, which is corresponding to atomic transition $5^{2}S_{1/2},\ F = 2 \ \rightarrow\ 5^{2}P_{3/2},\ F^{\prime} = 2,\ 3$ of isotope $^{87}$Rb. The Allan deviation of the fractional frequency of the ultralong Faraday laser output signal in 0.1 s -- 1 s measuring time is around $1\times10^{-11}$.

physics.atom-ph↗

arXiv2014

Reach-Avoid Problems with Time-Varying Dynamics, Targets and Constraints

We consider a reach-avoid differential game, in which one of the players aims to steer the system into a target set without violating a set of state constraints, while the other player tries to prevent the first from succeeding; the system dynamics, target set, and state constraints may all be time-varying. The analysis of this problem plays an important role in collision avoidance, motion planning and aircraft control, among other applications. Previous methods for computing the guaranteed winning initial conditions and strategies for each player have either required augmenting the state vector to include time, or have been limited to problems with either no state constraints or entirely static targets, constraints and dynamics. To incorporate time-varying dynamics, targets and constraints without the need for state augmentation, we propose a modified Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs equation in the form of a double-obstacle variational inequality, and prove that the zero sublevel set of its viscosity solution characterizes the capture basin for the target under the state constraints. Through this formulation, our method can compute the capture basin and winning strategies for time-varying games at no additional computational cost with respect to the time-invariant case. We provide an implementation of this method based on well-known numerical schemes and show its convergence through a simple example; we include a second example in which our method substantially outperforms the state augmentation approach.

math.OC↗