ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- All Subjects: engineering
- Creators: Berman, Spring
However, road driving at any reasonable speed involves some risks. Therefore, even with high-tech AV algorithms and sophisticated sensors, there may be unavoidable crashes due to imperfection of the AV systems, or unexpected encounters with wildlife, children and pedestrians. Whenever there is a risk involved, there is the need for an ethical decision to be made [33].
While ethical and moral decision-making in humans has long been studied by experts, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) also calls for machine ethics. To study the different moral and ethical decisions made by humans, experts may use the Trolley Problem [34], which is a scenario where one must pull a switch near a trolley track to redirect the trolley to kill one person on the track or do nothing, which will result in the deaths of five people. While it is important to take into account the input of members of a society and perform studies to understand how humans crash during unavoidable accidents to help program moral and ethical decision-making into self-driving cars, using the classical trolley problem is not ideal, as it is unrealistic and does not represent moral situations that people face in the real world.
This work seeks to increase the realism of the classical trolley problem for use in studies on moral and ethical decision-making by simulating realistic driving conditions in an immersive virtual environment with unavoidable crash scenarios, to investigate how drivers crash during these scenarios. Chapter 1 gives an in-depth background into autonomous vehicles and relevant ethical and moral problems; Chapter 2 describes current state-of-the-art online tools and simulators that were developed to study moral decision-making during unavoidable crashes. Chapters 3 focuses on building the simulator and the design of the crash scenarios. Chapter 4 describes human subjects experiments that were conducted with the simulator and their results, and Chapter 5 provides conclusions and avenues for future work.
What should the control system bandwidth be vis--vis the flapping frequency (so that averaging the nonlinear system is valid)?
When is first order averaging sufficient? When is higher order averaging necessary?
When can wing mass be neglected and when does wing mass become critical to model?
This includes how and when the rules given can be tightened; i.e. made less conservative.
attention. Many components in a navigation system, such as the master oscillator
driving the receiver system, as well the master oscillator in the transmitting system
contribute significantly to timing errors. Algorithms in the navigation processor must
be able to predict and compensate such errors to achieve a specified accuracy. While
much work has been done on the fundamentals of these problems, the thinking on said
problems has not progressed. On the hardware end, the designers of local oscillators
focus on synthesized frequency and loop noise bandwidth. This does nothing to
mitigate, or reduce frequency stability degradation in band. Similarly, there are not
systematic methods to accommodate phase and frequency anomalies such as clock
jumps. Phase locked loops are fundamentally control systems, and while control
theory has had significant advancement over the last 30 years, the design of timekeeping
sources has not advanced beyond classical control. On the software end,
single or two state oscillator models are typically embedded in a Kalman Filter to
alleviate time errors between the transmitter and receiver clock. Such models are
appropriate for short term time accuracy, but insufficient for long term time accuracy.
Additionally, flicker frequency noise may be present in oscillators, and it presents
mathematical modeling complications. This work proposes novel H∞ control methods
to address the shortcomings in the standard design of time-keeping phase locked loops.
Such methods allow the designer to address frequency stability degradation as well
as high phase/frequency dynamics. Additionally, finite-dimensional approximants of
flicker frequency noise that are more representative of the truth system than the
tradition Gauss Markov approach are derived. Last, to maintain timing accuracy in
a wide variety of operating environments, novel Banks of Adaptive Extended Kalman
Filters are used to address both stochastic and dynamic uncertainty.
This dissertation presents a control-theoretic analysis of mean-field models for which the agent dynamics are governed by either a continuous-time Markov chain on an arbitrary state space, or a discrete-time Markov chain on a continuous state space. Three main problems are investigated. First, the problem of stabilization is addressed, that is, the design of transition probabilities/rates of the Markov process (the agent control parameters) that make a target distribution, satisfying certain conditions, invariant. Such a control approach could be used to achieve desired multi-agent distributions for spatial coverage and task allocation. However, the convergence of the multi-agent distribution to the designed equilibrium does not imply the convergence of the individual agents to fixed states. To prevent the agents from continuing to transition between states once the target distribution is reached, and thus potentially waste energy, the second problem addressed within this dissertation is the construction of feedback control laws that prevent agents from transitioning once the equilibrium distribution is reached. The third problem addressed is the computation of optimized transition probabilities/rates that maximize the speed at which the system converges to the target distribution.
One contribution of this work is the design of a new open-source based Quadrotor platform for research. This platform is compatible with both HTC Vive Tracking System (HVTS) and OptiTrack Motion Capture System, Robot Operating System (ROS), and MAVLINK communication protocol.
The thesis examined both nonlinear and linear modeling of a 6-DOF rigid-body quadrotor's dynamics along with actuator dynamics. Nonlinear/linear models are used to develop control laws for both low-level and high-level hierarchical control structures. Both HVTS and OptiTrack were used to demonstrate path following for single and multiple quadrotors. Hardware and simulation data are compared. In short, this work establishes a foundation for future work on formation flight of multi-quadrotor.