Kevin S. Galloway

Kevin S. Galloway, Biswadip Dey

Motivated by real-world applications of unmanned aerial vehicles, this paper introduces a decentralized control mechanism to guide steering control of autonomous agents maneuvering in the vicinity of multiple moving entities (e.g. other autonomous agents) and stationary entities (e.g. fixed beacons or points of references) in a three-dimensional environment. The proposed control law, which can be perceived as a modification of the three-dimensional constant bearing (CB) pursuit law, provides a means to allocate simultaneous attention to multiple entities. We investigate the behavior of the closed-loop dynamics for a system with one agent referencing two beacons, as well as a two-agent mutual pursuit system wherein each agent employs the beacon-referenced CB pursuit law with regards to the other agent and a stationary beacon. Under certain assumptions on the associated control parameters, we demonstrate that this problem admits circling equilibria with agents moving on circular orbits with a common radius, in planes perpendicular to a common axis passing through the beacons. As the common radius and distances from the beacon are determined by the choice of parameters in the pursuit law, this approach provides a means to engineer desired formations in a 3-dimensional setting.

Kevin S. Galloway, Biswadip Dey

Motivated by station-keeping applications in various unmanned settings, this paper introduces a steering control law for a pair of agents operating in the vicinity of a fixed beacon in a three-dimensional environment. This feedback law is a modification of the previously studied three-dimensional constant bearing (CB) pursuit law, in the sense that it incorporates an additional term to allocate attention to the beacon. We investigate the behavior of the closed-loop dynamics for a two agent mutual pursuit system in which each agent employs the beacon-referenced CB pursuit law with regards to the other agent and a stationary beacon. Under certain assumptions on the associated control parameters, we demonstrate that this problem admits circling equilibria wherein the agents move on circular orbits with a common radius, in planes perpendicular to a common axis passing through the beacon. As the common radius and distances from the beacon are determined by choice of parameters in the feedback law, this approach provides a means to engineer desired formations in a three-dimensional setting.

Kevin S. Galloway, Biswadip Dey

Cyclic pursuit frameworks provide an efficient way to create useful global behaviors out of pairwise interactions in a collective of autonomous robots. Earlier work studied cyclic pursuit with a constant bearing (CB) pursuit law, and has demonstrated the existence of a variety of interesting behaviors for the corresponding dynamics. In this work, by attaching multiple branches to a single cycle, we introduce a modified version of this framework which allows us to consider any weakly connected pursuit graph where each node has an outdegree of 1. This provides a further generalization of the cyclic pursuit setting. Then, after showing existence of relative equilibria (rectilinear or circling motion), pure shape equilibria (spiraling motion) and periodic orbits, we also derive necessary conditions for stability of a 3-agent collective. By paving a way for individual agents to join or leave a collective without perturbing the motion of others, our approach leads to improved reliability of the overall system.

Kevin S. Galloway, Biswadip Dey

Cyclic pursuit frameworks, which are built upon pursuit interactions between neighboring agents in a cycle graph, provide an efficient way to create useful global behaviors in a collective of autonomous robots. Previous work had considered cyclic pursuit with a constant bearing (CB) pursuit law, and demonstrated the existence of circling equilibria for the corresponding dynamics. In this work, we propose a beacon-referenced version of the CB pursuit law, wherein a stationary beacon provides an additional reference for the individual agents in a collective. When implemented in a cyclic framework, we show that the resulting dynamics admit relative equilibria corresponding to a circling orbit around the beacon, with the circling radius and the distribution of agents along the orbit determined by parameters of the proposed pursuit law. We also derive necessary conditions for stability of the circling equilibria, which provides a guide for parameter selection. Finally, by introducing a change of variables, we demonstrate the existence of a family of invariant manifolds related to spiraling motions around the beacon which preserve the "pure shape" of the collective, and study the reduced dynamics on a representative manifold.

Kevin Galloway, Koushil Sreenath, Aaron D. Ames et al.

This paper presents a novel method for directly incorporating user-defined control input saturations into the calculation of a control Lyapunov function (CLF)-based walking controller for a biped robot. Previous work by the authors has demonstrated the effectiveness of CLF controllers for stabilizing periodic gaits for biped walkers, and the current work expands on those results by providing a more effective means for handling control saturations. The new approach, based on a convex optimization routine running at a 1 kHz control update rate, is useful not only for handling torque saturations but also for incorporating a whole family of user-defined constraints into the online computation of a CLF controller. The paper concludes with an experimental implementation of the main results on the bipedal robot MABEL.