arXiv subjects

Yebin Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yebin Wang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Path Planning and Motion Control for Accurate Positioning of Car-like Robots

This paper investigates the planning and control for accurate positioning of car-like robots. We propose a solution that integrates two modules: a motion planner, facilitated by the rapidly-exploring random tree algorithm and continuous-curvature (CC) steering technique, generates a CC trajectory as a reference; and a nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC) regulates the robot to accurately track the reference trajectory. Based on the $μ$-tangency conditions in prior art, we derive explicit existence conditions and develop associated computation methods for a special class of CC paths which not only admit the same driving patterns as Reeds-Shepp paths but also consist of cusp-free clothoid turns. Afterwards, we create an autonomous vehicle parking scenario where the NMPC endeavors to follow the reference trajectory. Feasibility and computational efficiency of the CC steering are validated by numerical simulation. CarSim-Simulink joint simulations statistically verify that with exactly same NMPC, the closed-loop system with CC trajectories as references substantially outperforms the case where Reeds-Shepp trajectories are used as references.

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arXiv2024

A Differentiable Dynamic Modeling Approach to Integrated Motion Planning and Actuator Physical Design for Mobile Manipulators

This paper investigates the differentiable dynamic modeling of mobile manipulators to facilitate efficient motion planning and physical design of actuators, where the actuator design is parameterized by physically meaningful motor geometry parameters. These parameters impact the manipulator's link mass, inertia, center-of-mass, torque constraints, and angular velocity constraints, influencing control authority in motion planning and trajectory tracking control. A motor's maximum torque/speed and how the design parameters affect the dynamics are modeled analytically, facilitating differentiable and analytical dynamic modeling. Additionally, an integrated locomotion and manipulation planning problem is formulated with direct collocation discretization, using the proposed differentiable dynamics and motor parameterization. Such dynamics are required to capture the dynamic coupling between the base and the manipulator. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of differentiable dynamics in speeding up optimization and advantages in task completion time and energy consumption over established sequential motion planning approach. Finally, this paper introduces a simultaneous actuator design and motion planning framework, providing numerical results to validate the proposed differentiable modeling approach for co-design problems.

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arXiv2024

iPolicy: Incremental Policy Algorithms for Feedback Motion Planning

This paper presents policy-based motion planning for robotic systems. The motion planning literature has been mostly focused on open-loop trajectory planning which is followed by tracking online. In contrast, we solve the problem of path planning and controller synthesis simultaneously by solving the related feedback control problem. We present a novel incremental policy (iPolicy) algorithm for motion planning, which integrates sampling-based methods and set-valued optimal control methods to compute feedback controllers for the robotic system. In particular, we use sampling to incrementally construct the state space of the system. Asynchronous value iterations are performed on the sampled state space to synthesize the incremental policy feedback controller. We show the convergence of the estimates to the optimal value function in continuous state space. Numerical results with various different dynamical systems (including nonholonomic systems) verify the optimality and effectiveness of iPolicy.

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arXiv2023

Scalable Optimal Power Management for Large-Scale Battery Energy Storage Systems

Large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) are helping transition the world towards sustainability with their broad use, among others, in electrified transportation, power grid, and renewables. However, optimal power management for them is often computationally formidable. To overcome this challenge, we develop a scalable approach in the paper. The proposed approach partitions the constituting cells of a large-scale BESS into clusters based on their state-of-charge (SoC), temperature, and internal resistance. Each cluster is characterized by a representative model that approximately captures its collective SoC and temperature dynamics, as well as its overall power losses in charging/discharging. Based on the clusters, we then formulate a problem of receding-horizon optimal power control to minimize the power losses while promoting SoC and temperature balancing. The cluster-based power optimization will decide the power quota for each cluster, and then every cluster will split the quota among the constituent cells. Since the number of clusters is much fewer than the number of cells, the proposed approach significantly reduces the computational costs, allowing optimal power management to scale up to large-scale BESS. Extensive simulations are performed to evaluate the proposed approach. The obtained results highlight a significant computational overhead reduction by more than 60% for a small-scale and 98% for a large-scale BESS compared to the conventional cell-level optimization. Experimental validation based on a 20-cell prototype further demonstrates its effectiveness and utility.

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arXiv2023

Application-Oriented Co-Design of Motors and Motions for a 6DOF Robot Manipulator

This work investigates an application-driven co-design problem where the motion and motors of a six degrees of freedom robotic manipulator are optimized simultaneously, and the application is characterized by a set of tasks. Unlike the state-of-the-art which selects motors from a product catalogue and performs co-design for a single task, this work designs the motor geometry as well as motion for a specific application. Contributions are made towards solving the proposed co-design problem in a computationally-efficient manner. First, a two-step process is proposed, where multiple motor designs are identified by optimizing motions and motors for multiple tasks one by one, and then are reconciled to determine the final motor design. Second, magnetic equivalent circuit modeling is exploited to establish the analytic mapping from motor design parameters to dynamic models and objective functions to facilitate the subsequent differentiable simulation. Third, a direct-collocation-based differentiable simulator of motor and robotic arm dynamics is developed to balance the computational complexity and numerical stability. Simulation verifies that higher performance for a specific application can be achieved with the multi-task method, compared to several benchmark co-design methods.

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arXiv2023

A Novel Modular, Reconfigurable Battery Energy Storage System: Design, Control, and Experimentation

This paper presents a novel modular, reconfigurable battery energy storage system. The proposed design is characterized by a tight integration of reconfigurable power switches and DC/DC converters. This characteristic enables isolation of faulty cells from the system and allows fine power control for individual cells toward optimal system-level performance. An optimal power management approach is developed to extensively exploit the merits of the proposed design. Based on receding-horizon convex optimization, this approach aims to minimize the total power losses in charging/discharging while allocating the power in line with each cell's condition to achieve state-of-charge (SoC) and temperature balancing. By appropriate design, the approach manages to regulate the power of a cell across its full SoC range and guarantees the feasibility of the optimization problem. We perform extensive simulations and further develop a lab-scale prototype to validate the proposed system design and power management approach.

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arXiv2022

Health-aware and user-involved battery charging management for electric vehicles: linear quadratic strategies

This paper studies control-theory-enabled intelligent charging management for battery systems in electric vehicles (EVs). Charging is crucial for the battery performance and life as well as a contributory factor to a user's confidence in or anxiety about EVs. For the existing practices and methods, many run with a lack of battery health awareness during charging, and none includes the user needs into the charging loop. To remedy such deficiencies, we propose to perform charging that, for the first time, allows the user to specify charging objectives and accomplish them through dynamic control, in addition to suppressing the charging-induced negative effects on battery health. Two charging strategies are developed using the linear quadratic control theory. Among them, one is based on control with fixed terminal charging state, and the other on tracking a reference charging path. They are computationally competitive, without requiring real-time constrained optimization as needed in most charging techniques available in the literature. A simulation-based study demonstrates their effectiveness and potential. It is anticipated that charging with health awareness and user involvement guaranteed by the proposed strategies will bring major improvements to not only the battery longevity but also the EV user satisfaction.

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arXiv2022

Autonomous Vehicle Parking in Dynamic Environments: An Integrated System with Prediction and Motion Planning

This paper presents an integrated motion planning system for autonomous vehicle (AV) parking in the presence of other moving vehicles. The proposed system includes 1) a hybrid environment predictor that predicts the motions of the surrounding vehicles and 2) a strategic motion planner that reacts to the predictions. The hybrid environment predictor performs short-term predictions via an extended Kalman filter and an adaptive observer. It also combines short-term predictions with a driver behavior cost-map to make long-term predictions. The strategic motion planner comprises 1) a model predictive control-based safety controller for trajectory tracking; 2) a search-based retreating planner for finding an evasion path in an emergency; 3) an optimization-based repairing planner for planning a new path when the original path is invalidated. Simulation validation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of initial planning, motion prediction, safe tracking, retreating in an emergency, and trajectory repairing.

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arXiv2020

Stochastic optimal control formalism for an open quantum system

A stochastic procedure is developed which allows one to express Pontryagin's maximum principle for dissipative quantum system solely in terms of stochastic wave functions. Time-optimal controls can be efficiently computed without computing the density matrix. Specifically, the proper dynamical update rules are presented for the stochastic costate variables introduced by Pontryagin's maximum principle and restrictions on the form of the terminal cost function are discussed. The proposed procedure is confirmed by comparing the results to those obtained from optimal control on Lindbladian dynamics. Numerically, the proposed formalism becomes time and memory efficient for large systems, and it can be generalized to describe non-Markovian dynamics.

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arXiv2020

Real-Time Optimal Lithium-Ion Battery Charging Based on Explicit Model Predictive Control

The rapidly growing use of lithium-ion batteries across various industries highlights the pressing issue of optimal charging control, as charging plays a crucial role in the health, safety and life of batteries. The literature increasingly adopts model predictive control (MPC) to address this issue, taking advantage of its capability of performing optimization under constraints. However, the computationally complex online constrained optimization intrinsic to MPC often hinders real-time implementation. This paper is thus proposed to develop a framework for real-time charging control based on explicit MPC (eMPC), exploiting its advantage in characterizing an explicit solution to an MPC problem, to enable real-time charging control. The study begins with the formulation of MPC charging based on a nonlinear equivalent circuit model. Then, multi-segment linearization is conducted to the original model, and applying the eMPC design to the obtained linear models leads to a charging control algorithm. The proposed algorithm shifts the constrained optimization to offline by precomputing explicit solutions to the charging problem and expressing the charging law as piecewise affine functions. This drastically reduces not only the online computational costs in the control run but also the difficulty of coding. Extensive numerical simulation and experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed eMPC charging control framework and algorithm. The research results can potentially meet the needs for real-time battery management running on embedded hardware.

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arXiv2020

One-Shot Parameter Identification of the Thevenin's Model for Batteries: Methods and Validation

Parameter estimation is of foundational importance for various model-based battery management tasks, including charging control, state-of-charge estimation and aging assessment. However, it remains a challenging issue as the existing methods generally depend on cumbersome and time-consuming procedures to extract battery parameters from data. Departing from the literature, this paper sets the unique aim of identifying all the parameters offline in a one-shot procedure, including the resistance and capacitance parameters and the parameters in the parameterized function mapping from the state-of-charge to the open-circuit voltage. Considering the well-known Thevenin's battery model, the study begins with the parameter identifiability analysis, showing that all the parameters are locally identifiable. Then, it formulates the parameter identification problem in a prediction-error-minimization framework. As the non-convexity intrinsic to the problem may lead to physically meaningless estimates, two methods are developed to overcome this issue. The first one is to constrain the parameter search within a reasonable space by setting parameter bounds, and the other adopts regularization of the cost function using prior parameter guess. The proposed identifiability analysis and identification methods are extensively validated through simulations and experiments.

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arXiv2020

Nonlinear Double-Capacitor Model for Rechargeable Batteries: Modeling, Identification and Validation

This paper proposes a new equivalent circuit model for rechargeable batteries by modifying a double-capacitor model proposed in [1]. It is known that the original model can address the rate capacity effect and energy recovery effect inherent to batteries better than other models. However, it is a purely linear model and includes no representation of a battery's nonlinear phenomena. Hence, this work transforms the original model by introducing a nonlinear-mapping-based voltage source and a serial RC circuit. The modification is justified by an analogy with the single-particle model. Two parameter estimation approaches, termed 1.0 and 2.0, are designed for the new model to deal with the scenarios of constant-current and variable-current charging/discharging, respectively. In particular, the 2.0 approach proposes the notion of Wiener system identification based on maximum a posteriori estimation, which allows all the parameters to be estimated in one shot while overcoming the nonconvexity or local minima issue to obtain physically reasonable estimates. An extensive experimental evaluation shows that the proposed model offers excellent accuracy and predictive capability. A comparison against the Rint and Thevenin models further points to its superiority. With high fidelity and low mathematical complexity, this model is beneficial for various real-time battery management applications.

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arXiv2020

Time-optimal control of a dissipative qubit

A formalism based on Pontryagin's maximum principle is applied to determine the time-optimal protocol that drives a general initial state to a target state by a Hamiltonian with limited control, i.e., there is a single control field with bounded amplitude. The coupling between the bath and the qubit is modeled by a Lindblad master equation. Dissipation typically drives the system to the maximally mixed state; consequently, there generally exists an optimal evolution time beyond which the decoherence prevents the system from getting closer to the target state. For some specific dissipation channel, however, the optimal control can keep the system from the maximum entropy state for infinitely long. The conditions under which this specific situation arises are discussed in detail. The numerical procedure to construct the time-optimal protocol is described. In particular, the formalism adopted here can efficiently evaluate the time-dependent singular control which turns out to be crucial in controlling either an isolated or a dissipative qubit.

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arXiv2019

Application of Pontryagin's Minimum Principle to Grover's Quantum Search Problem

Grover's algorithm is one of the most famous algorithms which explicitly demonstrates how the quantum nature can be utilized to accelerate the searching process. In this work, Grover's quantum search problem is mapped to a time-optimal control problem. Resorting to Pontryagin's Minimum Principle we find that the time-optimal solution has the bang-singular-bang structure. This structure can be derived naturally, without integrating the differential equations, using the geometric control technique where Hamiltonians in the Schrödinger's equation are represented as vector fields. In view of optimal control, Grover's algorithm uses the bang-bang protocol to approximate the optimal protocol with a minimized number of bang-to-bang switchings to reduce the query complexity. Our work provides a concrete example how Pontryagin's Minimum Principle is connected to quantum computation, and offers insight into how a quantum algorithm can be designed.

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arXiv2019

Safe Approximate Dynamic Programming Via Kernelized Lipschitz Estimation

We develop a method for obtaining safe initial policies for reinforcement learning via approximate dynamic programming (ADP) techniques for uncertain systems evolving with discrete-time dynamics. We employ kernelized Lipschitz estimation and semidefinite programming for computing admissible initial control policies with provably high probability. Such admissible controllers enable safe initialization and constraint enforcement while providing exponential stability of the equilibrium of the closed-loop system.

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arXiv2019

Robust Extended Kalman Filtering for Systems with Measurement Outliers

Outliers can contaminate the measurement process of many nonlinear systems, which can be caused by sensor errors, model uncertainties, change in ambient environment, data loss or malicious cyber attacks. When the extended Kalman filter (EKF) is applied to such systems for state estimation, the outliers can seriously reduce the estimation accuracy. This paper proposes an innovation saturation mechanism to modify the EKF toward building robustness against outliers. This mechanism applies a saturation function to the innovation process that the EKF leverages to correct the state estimation. As such, when an outlier occurs, the distorting innovation is saturated and thus prevented from damaging the state estimation. The mechanism features an adaptive adjustment of the saturation bound. The design leads to the development robust EKF approaches for continuous- and discrete-time systems. They are proven to be capable of generating bounded-error estimation in the presence of bounded outlier disturbances. An application study about mobile robot localization is presented, with the numerical simulation showing the efficacy of the proposed design. Compared to existing methods, the proposed approaches can effectively reject outliers of various magnitudes, types and durations, at significant computational efficiency and without requiring measurement redundancy.

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arXiv2017

Nonlinear Bayesian Estimation: From Kalman Filtering to a Broader Horizon

This article presents an up-to-date tutorial review of nonlinear Bayesian estimation. State estimation for nonlinear systems has been a challenge encountered in a wide range of engineering fields, attracting decades of research effort. To date, one of the most promising and popular approaches is to view and address the problem from a Bayesian probabilistic perspective, which enables estimation of the unknown state variables by tracking their probabilistic distribution or statistics (e.g., mean and covariance) conditioned on the system's measurement data. This article offers a systematic introduction of the Bayesian state estimation framework and reviews various Kalman filtering (KF) techniques, progressively from the standard KF for linear systems to extended KF, unscented KF and ensemble KF for nonlinear systems. It also overviews other prominent or emerging Bayesian estimation methods including the Gaussian filtering, Gaussian-sum filtering, particle filtering and moving horizon estimation and extends the discussion of state estimation forward to more complicated problems such as simultaneous state and parameter/input estimation.

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arXiv2017

Co-design of Safe and Efficient Networked Control Systems in Factory Automation with State-dependent Wireless Fading Channels

In factory automation, heterogeneous manufacturing processes need to be coordinated over wireless networks to achieve safety and efficiency. These wireless networks, however, are inherently unreliable due to shadow fading induced by the physical motion of the machinery. To assure both safety and efficiency, this paper proposes a state-dependent channel model that captures the interaction between the physical and communication systems. By adopting this channel model, sufficient conditions on the maximum allowable transmission interval are then derived to ensure stochastic safety for a nonlinear physical system controlled over a state-dependent wireless fading channel. Under these sufficient conditions, the safety and efficiency co-design problem is formulated as a constrained cooperative game, whose equilibria represent optimal control and transmission power policies that minimize a discounted joint-cost in an infinite horizon. This paper shows that the equilibria of the constrained game are solutions to a non-convex generalized geometric program, which are approximated by solving two convex programs. The optimality gap is quantified as a function of the size of the approximation region in convex programs, and asymptotically converges to zero by adopting a branch-bound algorithm. Simulation results of a networked robotic arm and a forklift truck are presented to verify the proposed co-design method.

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