Autonomous system (mathematics)

About: Autonomous system (mathematics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1648 publications have been published within this topic receiving 38373 citations.

Systems Research for Practical Autonomy in Unmanned Air Vehicles

Abstract: There exists a general expectation that advanced unmanned vehicles will require autonomous functionality, over and above a straightforward increase in level of automation. Much work is currently in hand in the research and development of algorithms and software approaches to achieve autonomy, but it is perceived that less attention is being given to hardware optimized to execute the algorithms. This paper will discuss practical approaches in achieving autonomy, what tools might be required to provide it, and what the implementation might be in a systems engineering context. The areas concerning systems testing and flight certification will also be touched upon. Work at Blue Bear Systems Research (BBSR), has concentrated on use of the Soar Artificial Intelligence language. This is not the only approach that can be used for the purpose, but has the attractive properties of reasoning, problem solving, planning and learning. Intelligent systems of this type are often referred to as ‘agents’. It is often the case that these agents can become very large very quickly, and BBSR have been pursuing a more modular approach. To achieve the complexity likely to be implicit in a future autonomous system it is probable that the end system will need to be a multi-agent structure with communicating sub-agents having specialization in a specific task such as situational awareness, combat tactics, team-working or optimal route planning. Note that by their very nature these processes may be asynchronous, and indeed something like planning may be a ‘batch-mode’ job, where the agent is given a task and it then informs the other agents when it has completed, and presents its results. Note also that these different functions are likely to be expressed using differing techniques and software embodiment. Thus a multi-agent system could, for example, use Bayesian belief approaches for reasoning, Soar methods for problem solving and learning, and a direct mathematical algorithm implemented in C to carry out the route planning. Considerable effort at BBSR has been expended in investigating hardware solutions suitable for the implementation of distributed agents in smaller UAV’s and Micro Air Vehicles. This requirement focuses on size weight and power requirements in order to provide sufficient the required computing resource, whilst providing a direct route to larger, more capable systems that could equip a larger J-UCAS class UCAV. The paper will present techniques from computer science in the employment of clustering techniques using low-cost X-scale and PC based processors, and the relative merits of Floating Point Gate Array (FPGA) solutions. This will be illustrated in the context of a complex multi-agent system designed to search a network of roads.

Attractor of Smale-Williams type in autonomous distributed system

Abstract: We consider an autonomous system of partial differential equations for one-dimensional distributed medium with periodic boundary conditions. Dynamics in time consists of alternating birth and death of patterns with spatial phases transformed from one stage of activity to another by the doubly expanding circle map. So, attractor in the Poincare section is uniformly hyperbolic, a kind of Smale-Williams solenoid. Finite-dimensional models are derived as ordinary differential equations for amplitudes of spatial Fourier modes (the 5D and 7D models). Correspondence of the reduced models to the original system is demonstrated numerically. Computational verification of the hyperbolicity criterion is performed for the reduced models: the distribution of angles of intersection for stable and unstable manifolds on the attractor is separated from zero, i.e. the touches are excluded. The considered example gives a partial justification to the old hopes that chaotic behavior of autonomous distributed systems may be associated with uniformly hyperbolic attractors.

Stereo Vision-based Autonomous Target Detection and Tracking on an Omnidirectional Mobile Robot

Abstract: In this paper, a mobile robot equipped with an onboard computing unit and a stereo camera for autonomous target detection and tracking is introduced. This system can figure out an interesting target and track it robustly in real time. It is based on the ROS framework and can handle multi-resource information, such as RGB images, depth information, and IMU data. To balance the performance of the machine learning based object detection algorithm and the algorithm for object tracking, the Hamming distance and the intersection over union are selected as criteria. The performance of the system is verified in a hardware experiment in two typical scenarios.

Classical exact output regulation

Abstract: The precise formulation and study of the classical exact output regulation problem is the topic of this chapter We consider a system with an exogenous input and a control input (both might be vector-valued) The exogenous input is generated by an autonomous system (ie a system without inputs) which is called the exosystem The objective is to find a feedback controller such that an output of the system converges to zero as time tends to infinity This can be used to model asymptotic tracking as well as asymptotic disturbance rejection

Truly random dynamics generated by autonomous dynamical systems

Abstract: We investigate explicit functions that can produce truly random numbers. We use the analytical properties of the explicit functions to show that a certain class of autonomous dynamical systems can generate random dynamics. This dynamics presents fundamental differences with the known chaotic systems. We present real physical systems that can produce this kind of random time-series. Some applications are discussed.