Morgan Jones

Songlin Jin, Yuanbo Nie, Morgan Jones

Feedback Linearisation (FBL) is a widely used technique that applies feedback laws to transform input-affine nonlinear control systems into linear control systems, allowing for the use of linear controller design methods such as pole placement. However, for problems with state constraints, controlling the linear system induced by FBL can be more challenging than controlling the original system. This is because simple state constraints in the original nonlinear system become complex nonlinear constraints in the FBL induced linearised system, thereby diminishing the advantages of linearisation. To avoid increasing the complexity of state constraints under FBL, this paper introduces a method to first augment system dynamics to capture state constraints before applying FBL. We show that our proposed augmentation method leads to ill-defined relative degrees at state constraint boundaries. However, we show that ill-defined relative degrees can be overcome by using a switching FBL controller. Numerical experiments illustrate the capabilities of this method for handling state constraints within the FBL framework.

Morgan Jones

This paper introduces a novel approach for learning polynomial representations of physical objects. Given a point cloud data set associated with a physical object, we solve a one-class classification problem to bound the data points by a polynomial sublevel set while harnessing Sum-of-Squares (SOS) programming to enforce prior shape knowledge constraints. By representing objects as polynomial sublevel sets we further show it is possible to construct a secondary SOS program to certify whether objects are packed correctly, that is object boundaries do not overlap and are inside some container set. While not employing reinforcement learning (RL) in this work, our proposed secondary SOS program does provide a potential surrogate reward function for RL algorithms, autonomously rewarding agents that propose object rotations and translations that correctly pack objects within a given container set.