Mohammad Zamani

Mohammad Zamani, Valery Ugrinovskii

The paper addresses the problem of distributed filtering with guaranteed convergence properties using minimum-energy filtering and $H_\infty$ filtering methodologies. A linear state space plant model is considered observed by a network of communicating sensors, in which individual sensor measurements may lead to an unobservable filtering problem. However, each filter locally shares estimates, that are subject to disturbances, with its respective neighboring filters to produce an estimate of the plant state. The minimum-energy strategy of the proposed local filter leads to a locally optimal time-varying filter gain facilitating the transient and the asymptotic convergence of the estimation error, with guaranteed $H_\infty$ performance. The filters are implementable using only the local measurements and information from the neighboring filters subject to disturbances. A key idea of the proposed algorithm is to locally approximate the neighboring estimates, that are not directly accessible, considering them as disturbance contaminated versions of the plant state. The proposed algorithm imposes minimal communication load on the network and is scalable to larger sensor networks.

Mohammad Zamani, Iman Shames, Valery Ugrinovskii

This paper presents a consensus algorithm for a multi-agent system where each agent has access to its imperfect own state and neighboring state measurements. The measurements are subject to deterministic disturbances and the proposed algorithm provides a minimum-energy estimate of the measured states which is instrumental in achieving consensus by the nodes. It is shown that the proposed consensus algorithm converges exponentially in the absence of disturbances, and its performance under bounded continuous disturbances is investigated as well. The convergence performance of the proposed method is further studied using simulations where we show that consensus is achieved despite using large measurement errors.

Farhad Farokhi, Alex S. Leong, Mohammad Zamani et al.

A learning-based safety filter is developed for discrete-time linear time-invariant systems with unknown models subject to Gaussian noises with unknown covariance. Safety is characterized using polytopic constraints on the states and control inputs. The empirically learned model and process noise covariance with their confidence bounds are used to construct a robust optimization problem for minimally modifying nominal control actions to ensure safety with high probability. The optimization problem relies on tightening the original safety constraints. The magnitude of the tightening is larger at the beginning since there is little information to construct reliable models, but shrinks with time as more data becomes available.

Oliver Biggar, Mohammad Zamani, Iman Shames

In this paper we provide a formal framework for comparing the expressive power of Behavior Trees (BTs) to other action selection architectures. Taking inspiration from the analogous comparisons of structural programming methodologies, we formalise the concept of `expressiveness'. This leads us to an expressiveness hierarchy of control architectures, which includes BTs, Decision Trees (DTs), Teleo-reactive Programs (TRs) and Finite State Machines (FSMs). By distinguishing between BTs with auxiliary variables and those without, we demonstrate the existence of a trade-off in BT design between readability and expressiveness. We discuss what this means for BTs in practice.

Jack Henderson, Mohammad Zamani, Robert Mahony et al.

Collaborative Localisation has been studied extensively in recent years as a way to improve pose estimation of unmanned aerial vehicles in challenging environments. However little attention has been paid toward advancing the underlying filter design beyond standard Extended Kalman Filter-based approaches. In this paper, we detail a discrete-time collaborative localisation filter using the deterministic minimum-energy framework. The filter incorporates measurements from an inertial measurement unit and models the effects of sensor bias and gravitational acceleration. We present a simulation based on real-world vehicle trajectories and IMU data that demonstrates how collaborative localisation can improve performance over single-vehicle methods.

Farhad Farokhi, Alex Leong, Iman Shames et al.

In many learning based control methodologies, learning the unknown dynamic model precedes the control phase, while the aim is to control the system such that it remains in some safe region of the state space. In this work, our aim is to guarantee safety while learning and control proceed simultaneously. Specifically, we consider the problem of safe learning in nonlinear control-affine systems subject to unknown additive uncertainty. We first model the uncertainty as a Gaussian noise and use state measurements to learn its mean and covariance. We provide rigorous time-varying bounds on the mean and covariance of the uncertainty and employ them to modify the control input via an optimization program with potentially time-varying safety constraints. We show that with an arbitrarily large probability we can guarantee that the state will remain in the safe set, while learning and control are carried out simultaneously, provided that a feasible solution exists for the optimization problem. We provide a secondary formulation of this optimization that is computationally more efficient. This is based on tightening the safety constraints to counter the uncertainty about the learned mean and covariance. The magnitude of the tightening can be decreased as our confidence in the learned mean and covariance increases (i.e., as we gather more measurements about the environment). Extensions of the method are provided for non-Gaussian process noise with unknown mean and covariance as well as Gaussian uncertainties with state-dependent mean and covariance to accommodate more general environments.

Jack Henderson, Mohammad Zamani, Robert Mahony et al.

Accurate localisation of unmanned aerial vehicles is vital for the next generation of automation tasks. This paper proposes a minimum energy filter for velocity-aided pose estimation on the extended special Euclidean group. The approach taken exploits the Lie-group symmetry of the problem to combine Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensor output with landmark measurements into a robust and high performance state estimate. We propose an asynchronous discrete-time implementation to fuse high bandwidth IMU with low bandwidth discrete-time landmark measurements typical of real-world scenarios. The filter's performance is demonstrated by simulation.

Oliver Biggar, Mohammad Zamani, Iman Shames

Modularity is a central principle throughout the design process for cyber-physical systems. Modularity reduces complexity and increases reuse of behavior. In this paper we pose and answer the following question: how can we identify independent `modules' within the structure of reactive control architectures? To this end, we propose a graph-structured control architecture we call a decision structure, and show how it generalises some reactive control architectures which are popular in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics, specifically Teleo-Reactive programs (TRs), Decision Trees (DTs), Behavior Trees (BTs) and Generalised Behavior Trees ($k$-BTs). Inspired by the definition of a module in graph theory, we define modules in decision structures and show how each decision structure possesses a canonical decomposition into its modules. We can naturally characterise each of the BTs, $k$-BTs, DTs and TRs by properties of their module decomposition. This allows us to recognise which decision structures are equivalent to each of these architectures in quadratic time. Our proposed concept of modules extends to formal verification, under any verification scheme capable of verifying a decision structure. Namely, we prove that a modification to a module within a decision structure has no greater flow-on effects than a modification to an individual action within that structure. This enables verification on modules to be done locally and hierarchically, where structures can be verified and then repeatedly locally modified, with modules replaced by modules while preserving correctness. To illustrate the findings, we present an example of a solar-powered drone controlled by a decision structure. We use a Linear Temporal Logic-based verification scheme to verify the correctness of this structure, and then show how one can modify modules while preserving its correctness.

Oliver Biggar, Mohammad Zamani, Iman Shames

As complex autonomous robotic systems become more widespread, the need for transparent and reusable Artificial Intelligence (AI) designs becomes more apparent. In this paper we analyse how the principles behind Behavior Trees (BTs), an increasingly popular tree-structured control architecture, are applicable to these goals. Using structured programming as a guide, we analyse the BT principles of reactiveness and modularity in a formal framework of action selection. Proceeding from these principles, we review a number of challenging use cases of BTs in the literature, and show that reasoning via these principles leads to compatible solutions. Extending these arguments, we introduce a new class of control architectures we call generalised BTs or $k$-BTs and show how they can extend the applicability of BTs to some of the aforementioned challenging BT use cases while preserving the BT principles.

Jack Henderson, Jochen Trumpf, Mohammad Zamani

We present a new approach to the cooperative localisation problem by applying the theory of minimum energy filtering. We consider the problem of estimating the pose of a group of mobile robots in an environment where robots can perceive fixed landmarks and neighbouring robots as well as share information with others over a communication channel. Whereas the vast majority of the existing literature applies some variant of a Kalman Filter, we derive a set of filter equations for the global state estimate based on the principle of minimum energy filtering. We show how the filter equations can be decoupled and the calculations distributed among the robots in the network without requiring a central processing node. Finally, we provide a demonstration of the filter's performance in simulation.