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Model Reference Adaptive Control For Mobile Manipulators And Beyond, Srivatsan Srinivasan

All Dissertations

In recent years, robotics has expanded into various sectors, including manufacturing, transportation, and household services, making the integration of autonomy a critical area of research. This shift aims to ensure safety and enhance the utility of autonomous systems. Traditionally, robotic applications focused separately on mobility, like automated guided vehicles, and manipulation, such as serial-chain arms in manufacturing. Today, however, we see a merging of these capabilities in the growing field of mobile manipulator robots that combine movement with purposeful interactive functionalities.

A typical mobile manipulator is a robotic arm mounted on a wheeled base. This thesis focuses on advancing control …

Modeling And Control Of A Planar Bounding Quadrupedal Robot, Patrick John Ward

Master's Theses

Legged robots have the potential to be a valuable technology that provides agile and adaptive locomotion over complex terrain. To realize legged locomotion's full abilities a control design must consider the nonlinear piecewise dynamics of the systems. This paper aims to develop a controller for the planar bounding of a quadrupedal robot.

The bounding of the quadruped robot is characterized by a simplified hybrid model that consists of two subsystems for stance and flight phases and the switching laws between the two states. An additional model, the Multibody model, with fewer simplifications, is used concurrently to best approximate real-world behavior. …

Evaluating Driving Performance Of A Novel Behavior Planning Model On Connected Autonomous Vehicles, Keyur Shah

Honors Scholar Theses

Many current algorithms and approaches in autonomous driving attempt to solve the "trajectory generation" or "trajectory following” problems: given a target behavior (e.g. stay in the current lane at the speed limit or change lane), what trajectory should the vehicle follow, and what inputs should the driving agent apply to the throttle and brake to achieve this trajectory? In this work, we instead focus on the “behavior planning” problem—specifically, should an autonomous vehicle change lane or keep lane given the current state of the system?

In addition, current theory mainly focuses on single-vehicle systems, where vehicles do not communicate with …

Optimal Direct Yaw Moment Control Of A 4wd Electric Vehicle, Winston James Wight

Master's Theses

This thesis is concerned with electronic stability of an all-wheel drive electric vehicle with independent motors mounted in each wheel. The additional controllability and speed permitted using independent motors can be exploited to improve the handling and stability of electric vehicles. In this thesis, these improvements arise from employing a direct yaw moment control (DYC) system that seeks to adapt the understeer gradient of the vehicle and achieve neutral steer by employing a supervisory controller and simultaneously tracking an ideal yaw rate and ideal sideslip angle. DYC enhances vehicle stability by generating a corrective yaw moment realized by a torque …

Comparison Of Lqr And Lqr-Mrac For Linear Tractor-Trailer Model, Kevin Richard Gasik

Master's Theses

The United States trucking industry is immense. Employing over three million drivers and traveling to every city in the country. Semi-Trucks travel millions of miles each week and encompass roads that civilians travel on. These vehicles should be safe and allow efficient travel for all. Autonomous vehicles have been discussed in controls for many decades. Now fleets of autonomous vehicles are beginning their integration into society. The ability to create an autonomous system requires domain and system specific knowledge. Approaches to implement a fully autonomous vehicle have been developed using different techniques in control systems such as Kalman Filters, Neural …

Dynamic Understeer Control Using Active Rear Toe, Mark Oliver Dixon Kaufman

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

This thesis was conducted to show the ability of Active Rear Toe to control the understeer characteristics of a vehicle. Active rear toe is the ability to control the angle of the rear wheels around the vertical axis, allowing the car’s turning radius to change. By changing this radius, the lateral acceleration can be controlled, therefore the understeer of the vehicle can be controlled. The controls scheme is a sliding mode control, specifically a hyperbolic tangent boundary layer and a type 1 zeno controller. The system shows effectiveness to control the understeer of the vehicle up until limit grip on …