Abstract:

The robotic path following problem is to design appropriate control laws to guarantee that the output of a robotic system follows some given desired path. Such control laws are particularly useful in many applications of industrial or mobile robots. However, some practical constraints make the robotic path following challenging. For example, fixed-wing UAVs are governed by nonholonomic dynamics and move mostly with constant speeds, and they require new effective control strategies when they try to follow curvy paths. Although there have been various methods to solve the path-following problem, I will show that the proposed vector-field method has many advantages, such as smaller tracking errors and less control effort. In our approach, the desired path is described by an implicit function which only needs to be sufficiently smooth. Then the vector field is constructed under the design of two orthogonal forces which guide the robot towards and along the path respectively. The constructed vector field renders naturally the realization of a control algorithm. In addition, motivated by the applications of monitoring the clouds, we also consider the case when the desired path is embedded in a moving frame perturbed by winds.

Bio:

Ming Cao is currently professor of networks and robotics with the Engineering and Technology Institute (ENTEG) at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where he started in 2008. He received the Bachelor degree in 1999 and the Master degree in 2002 from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and the PhD degree in 2007 from Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, all in electrical engineering. From September 2007 to August 2008, he was a postdoctoral research associate with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. He worked as a research intern during the summer of 2006 with the Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, NY, USA. He is the 2017 and inaugural recipient of the Manfred Thoma medal from the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) and the 2016 recipient of the European Control Award sponsored by the European Control Association (EUCA). He is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems and Systems and Control Letters. He is vice chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Large Scale Complex Systems also a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Networked Systems. His main research interest is in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, mobile sensor networks and complex networks.