Henk Nijmeijer

Alexander Katriniok, Stefan Kojchev, Erjen Lefeber et al.

We investigate the problem of coordinating human-driven vehicles in road intersections without any traffic lights or signs by issuing speed advices. The vehicles in the intersection are assumed to move along an a priori known path and to be connected via vehicle-to-vehicle communication. The challenge arises with the uncertain driver reaction to a speed advice, especially in terms of the driver reaction time delay, as it might lead to unstable system dynamics. For this control problem, a distributed stochastic model predictive control concept is designed which accounts for driver uncertainties. By optimizing over scenarios, which are sequences of independent and identically distributed samples of the uncertainty over the prediction horizon, we can give probabilistic guarantees on constraint satisfaction. Simulation results demonstrate that the scenario-based approach is able to avoid collisions in spite of uncertainty while the non-stochastic baseline controller is not.

D. J. F. Heck, A. Saccon, N. van de Wouw et al.

This work proposes a control law for a manipulator with the aim of realizing desired time-varying motion-force profiles in the presence of a stiff environment. In many cases, the interaction with the environment affects only one degree of freedom of the end-effector of the manipulator. Therefore, the focus is on this contact degree of freedom, and a switching position-force controller is proposed to perform the hybrid position-force tracking task. Sufficient conditions are presented to guarantee input-to-state stability of the switching closed-loop system with respect to perturbations related to the time-varying desired motion-force profile. The switching occurs when the manipulator makes or breaks contact with the environment. The analysis shows that to guarantee closed-loop stability while tracking arbitrary time-varying motion-force profiles, the controller should implement a considerable (and often unrealistic) amount of damping, resulting in inferior tracking performance. Therefore, we propose to redesign the manipulator with a compliant wrist. Guidelines are provided for the design of the compliant wrist while employing the designed switching control strategy, such that stable tracking of a motion-force reference trajectory can be achieved and bouncing of the manipulator while making contact with the stiff environment can be avoided. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.