Browsing by Author "Egerstedt, Magnus"
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Item Observability and Policy Optimization for Mobile Robots(2003) Egerstedt, Magnus; Hristu-Varsakelis, Dimitrios; ISRRecently there has been renewed interest in the study of abstractions of control laws for intelligent machines as a tool for managing the specification complexity of the control strategies necessary to accomplish most tasks of practical interest. This work considers the use of abstract descriptions of motion control programs and of the environment, and explores some new problems of system theoretic interest that arise as a result. We study the problem of active localization for a mobile robot moving on a sparsely-described uncertain environment and show how that problem can be posed as that of observability of a finite automaton. We present algorithms (based on Hidden Markov Models) that answer the question of i) whether or not a representation of the environment (in the form of a directed graph) is observable, and ii) what is the shortest navigation policy that allows the robot to uniquely identify its location on the graph.Item On the Structural Complexity of the Motion Description Language MDLe(2003) Hristu-Varsakelis, Dimitrios; Egerstedt, Magnus; Krishnaprasad, Perinkulam S.; ISRAs modern control theory attempts to elucidate the complexity of systems that combine differential equations and event-driven logic, it must overcome challenges having to do with limited expressive power as well as practical difficulties associated with translating control algorithms into robust and reusable software. The Motion Description Language (MDL) and its ``extended' counterpart MDLe, have been at the center of an ongoing effort to make progress on both of these fronts. The goal of this paper is to define MDLe as a formal language, thereby connecting with the vast literature on the subject, and to stimulate experimental work. We discuss the expressive power of MDLe and provide some examples of MDLe programs.This work has appeared in the Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2002.