Matching Items (62)
Description
Bicycle stabilization has become a popular topic because of its complex dynamic behavior and the large body of bicycle modeling research. Riding a bicycle requires accurately performing several tasks, such as balancing and navigation which may be difficult for disabled people. Their problems could be partially reduced by providing steering assistance. For stabilization of these highly maneuverable and efficient machines, many control techniques have been applied – achieving interesting results, but with some limitations which includes strict environmental requirements. This thesis expands on the work of Randlov and Alstrom, using reinforcement learning for bicycle self-stabilization with robotic steering. This thesis applies the deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm, which can handle continuous action spaces which is not possible for Q-learning technique. The research involved algorithm training on virtual environments followed by simulations to assess its results. Furthermore, hardware testing was also conducted on Arizona State University’s RISE lab Smart bicycle platform for testing its self-balancing performance. Detailed analysis of the bicycle trial runs are presented. Validation of testing was done by plotting the real-time states and actions collected during the outdoor testing which included the roll angle of bicycle. Further improvements in regard to model training and hardware testing are also presented.
ContributorsTurakhia, Shubham (Author) / Zhang, Wenlong (Thesis advisor) / Yong, Sze Zheng (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Recent years, there has been many attempts with different approaches to the human-robot interaction (HRI) problems. In this paper, the multi-agent interaction is formulated as a differential game with incomplete information. To tackle this problem, the parameter estimation method is utilized to obtain the approximated solution in a real time basis. Previous studies in the parameter estimation made the assumption that the human parameters are known by the robot; but such may not be the case and there exists uncertainty in the modeling of the human rewards as well as human's modeling of the robot's rewards. The proposed method, empathetic estimation, is tested and compared with the ``non-empathetic'' estimation from the existing works. The case studies are conducted in an uncontrolled intersection with two agents attempting to pass efficiently. Results have shown that in the case of both agents having inconsistent belief of the other agent's parameters, the empathetic agent performs better at estimating the parameters and has higher reward values, which indicates the scenarios when empathy is essential: when agent's initial belief is mismatched from the true parameters/intent of the agents.
ContributorsChen, Yi (Author) / Ren, Yi (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Wenlong (Committee member) / Yong, Sze Zheng (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
The tire blowout is potentially one of the most critical accidents that may occur on the road. Following a tire blowout, the mechanical behavior of the tire is extremely affected and the forces generating from the interaction of the tire and the ground are redistributed. This severe change in the mechanism of tire force generation influences the dynamic characteristics of the vehicle significantly. Thus, the vehicle loses its directional stability and has a risk of departing its lane and colliding with other vehicles or the guardrail. This work aims to further broaden our current knowledge of the vehicle dynamic response to a blowout scenario during both rectilinear and curvilinear motions. To that end, a fourteen degrees of freedom full vehicle model combined with the well-grounded Dugoff’s tire models is developed and validated using the high fidelity MSC Adams package. To examine the effect of the tire blowout on the dynamic behavior of the vehicle, a series of tests incorporating a tire blowout is conducted in both rectilinear and curvilinear maneuvers with different tire burst locations. It is observed that the reconstruction of the tire forces resulting from blowout leads to a substantial change in the dynamics of the vehicle as well as a severe directional instability and possibly a rollover accident. Consequently, a corrective safety control system utilizing a braking/traction torque actuation mechanism is designed. The basic idea of the stability controller is to produce a regulated amount of input torque on one or more wheels apart from the blown tire. The proposed novel control-oriented model eliminates the simplifying assumptions used in the design of such controllers. Furthermore, a double integrator was augmented to enhance the steady-state performance of the sliding mode closed-loop system. The chattering problem stemmed by the switching nature of the controller is diminished through tuning the slope of saturation function. Different apparatuses are used in terms of actuation, using an individual front actuator, utilizing multi-actuator, and using two-wheel braking torques successively. It is found that the proposed controllers are perfectly capable of stabilizing the vehicle and robustly track the desired trajectory in straight-line and cornering maneuvers.
ContributorsAl-Quran, Mahdi (Author) / Mayyas, Abdel Ra'Ouf (Thesis advisor) / Shuaib, Abdelrahman (Committee member) / Chen, Yan (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Yong, Sze (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
How to effectively and accurately describe, character and quantify the microstructure of the heterogeneous material and its 4D evolution process with time suffered from external stimuli or provocations is very difficult and challenging, but it’s significant and crucial for its performance prediction, processing, optimization and design. The goal of this research is to overcome these challenges by developing a series of novel hierarchical statistical microstructure descriptors called “n-point polytope functions” which is as known as Pn functions to quantify heterogeneous material’s microstructure and creating Pn functions related quantification methods which are Omega Metric and Differential Omega Metric to analyze its 4D processing.In this dissertation, a series of powerful programming tools are used to demonstrate that Pn functions can be used up to n=8 for chaotically scattered images which can hardly be distinguished by our naked eyes in chapter 3 to find or compare the potential configuration feature of structure such as symmetry or polygon geometry relation between the different targets when target’s multi-modal imaging is provided. These n-point statistic results calculated from Pn functions for features of interest in the microstructure can efficiently decompose the structural hidden features into a set of “polytope basis” to provide a concise, explainable, expressive, universal and efficient quantifying manner.
In Chapter 4, the Pn functions can also be incorporated into material reconstruction algorithms readily for fast virtualizing 3D microstructure regeneration and also allowing instant material property prediction via analytical structure-property mappings for material design.
In Chapter 5, Omega Metric and Differential Omega Metric are further created and used to provide a time-dependent reduced-dimension metric to analyze the 4D evaluation processing instead of using Pn functions directly because these 2 simplified methods can provide undistorted results to be easily compared. The real case of vapor-deposition alloy films analysis are implemented in this dissertation to demonstrate that One can use these methods to predict or optimize the design for 4D evolution of heterogeneous material.
The advantages of the all quantification methods in this dissertation can let us economically and efficiently quantify, design, predict the microstructure and 4D evolution of the heterogeneous material in various fields.
ContributorsCHEN, PEI-EN (Author) / Jiao, Yang (Thesis advisor) / Ren, Yi (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Yongming (Committee member) / Zhuang, Houlong (Committee member) / Nian, Qiong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Autonomous Driving (AD) systems are being researched and developed actively in recent days to solve the task of controlling the vehicles safely without human intervention. One method to solve such task is through deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach. In deep RL, the main objective is to find an optimal control behavior, often called policy performed by an agent, which is AD system in this case. This policy is usually learned through Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) based on the observations that the agent perceives along with rewards feedback received from environment.However, recent studies demonstrated the vulnerability of such control policies learned through deep RL against adversarial attacks. This raises concerns about the application of such policies to risk-sensitive tasks like AD. Previous adversarial attacks assume that the threats can be broadly realized in two ways: First one is targeted attacks through manipu- lation of the agent’s complete observation in real time and the other is untargeted attacks through manipulation of objects in environment. The former assumes full access to the agent’s observations at almost all time, while the latter has no control over outcomes of attack. This research investigates the feasibility of targeted attacks through physical adver- sarial objects in the environment, a threat that combines the effectiveness and practicality.
Through simulations on one of the popular AD systems, it is demonstrated that a fixed optimal policy can be malfunctioned over time by an attacker e.g., performing an unintended self-parking, when an adversarial object is present. The proposed approach is formulated in such a way that the attacker can learn a dynamics of the environment and also utilizes common knowledge of agent’s dynamics to realize the attack. Further, several experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed attack on different driving scenarios empirically. Lastly, this work also studies robustness of object location, and trade-off between the attack strength and attack length based on proposed evaluation metrics.
ContributorsBuddareddygari, Prasanth (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Pipeline infrastructure forms a vital aspect of the United States economy and standard of living. A majority of the current pipeline systems were installed in the early 1900’s and often lack a reliable database reporting the mechanical properties, and information about manufacturing and installation, thereby raising a concern for their safety and integrity. Testing for the aging pipe strength and toughness estimation without interrupting the transmission and operations thus becomes important. The state-of-the-art techniques tend to focus on the single modality deterministic estimation of pipe strength and do not account for inhomogeneity and uncertainties, many others appear to rely on destructive means. These gaps provide an impetus for novel methods to better characterize the pipe material properties. The focus of this study is the design of a Bayesian Network information fusion model for the prediction of accurate probabilistic pipe strength and consequently the maximum allowable operating pressure. A multimodal diagnosis is performed by assessing the mechanical property variation within the pipe in terms of material property measurements, such as microstructure, composition, hardness and other mechanical properties through experimental analysis, which are then integrated with the Bayesian network model that uses a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Prototype testing is carried out for model verification, validation and demonstration and data training of the model is employed to obtain a more accurate measure of the probabilistic pipe strength. With a view of providing a holistic measure of material performance in service, the fatigue properties of the pipe steel are investigated. The variation in the fatigue crack growth rate (da/dN) along the direction of the pipe wall thickness is studied in relation to the microstructure and the material constants for the crack growth have been reported. A combination of imaging and composition analysis is incorporated to study the fracture surface of the fatigue specimen. Finally, some well-known statistical inference models are employed for prediction of manufacturing process parameters for steel pipelines. The adaptability of the small datasets for the accuracy of the prediction outcomes is discussed and the models are compared for their performance.
ContributorsDahire, Sonam (Author) / Liu, Yongming (Thesis advisor) / Jiao, Yang (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
With the substantial development of intelligent robots, human-robot interaction (HRI) has become ubiquitous in applications such as collaborative manufacturing, surgical robotic operations, and autonomous driving. In all these applications, a human behavior model, which can provide predictions of human actions, is a helpful reference that helps robots to achieve intelligent interaction with humans. The requirement elicits an essential problem of how to properly model human behavior, especially when individuals are interacting or cooperating with each other. The major objective of this thesis is to utilize the human intention decoding method to help robots enhance their performance while interacting with humans. Preliminary work on integrating human intention estimation with an HRI scenario is shown to demonstrate the benefit. In order to achieve this goal, the research topic is divided into three phases. First, a novel method of an online measure of the human's reliance on the robot, which can be estimated through the intention decoding process from human actions，is described. An experiment that requires human participants to complete an object-moving task with a robot manipulator was conducted under different conditions of distractions. A relationship is discovered between human intention and trust while participants performed a familiar task with no distraction. This finding suggests a relationship between the psychological construct of trust and joint physical coordination, which bridges the human's action to its mental states. Then, a novel human collaborative dynamic model is introduced based on game theory and bounded rationality, which is a novel method to describe human dyadic behavior with the aforementioned theories. The mutual intention decoding process was also considered to inform this model. Through this model, the connection between the mental states of the individuals to their cooperative actions is indicated. A haptic interface is developed with a virtual environment and the experiments are conducted with 30 human subjects. The result suggests the existence of mutual intention decoding during the human dyadic cooperative behaviors. Last, the empirical results show that allowing agents to have empathy in inference, which lets the agents understand that others might have a false understanding of their intentions, can help to achieve correct intention inference. It has been verified that knowledge about vehicle dynamics was also important to correctly infer intentions. A new courteous policy is proposed that bounded the courteous motion using its inferred set of equilibrium motions. A simulation, which is set to reproduce an intersection passing case between an autonomous car and a human driving car, is conducted to demonstrate the benefit of the novel courteous control policy.
ContributorsWang, Yiwei (Author) / Zhang, Wenlong (Thesis advisor) / Berman, Spring (Committee member) / Lee, Hyunglae (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
In the development of autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs), how to guarantee vehicle lateral stability is one of the most critical aspects. Based on nonlinear vehicle lateral and tire dynamics, new driving requirements of AGVs demand further studies and analyses of vehicle lateral stability control strategies. To achieve comprehensive analyses and stability-guaranteed vehicle lateral driving control, this dissertation presents three main contributions.First, a new method is proposed to estimate and analyze vehicle lateral driving stability regions, which provide a direct and intuitive demonstration for stability control of AGVs. Based on a four-wheel vehicle model and a nonlinear 2D analytical LuGre tire model, a local linearization method is applied to estimate vehicle lateral driving stability regions by analyzing vehicle local stability at each operation point on a phase plane. The obtained stability regions are conservative because both vehicle and tire stability are simultaneously considered. Such a conservative feature is specifically important for characterizing the stability properties of AGVs.
Second, to analyze vehicle stability, two novel features of the estimated vehicle lateral driving stability regions are studied. First, a shifting vector is formulated to explicitly describe the shifting feature of the lateral stability regions with respect to the vehicle steering angles. Second, dynamic margins of the stability regions are formulated and applied to avoid the penetration of vehicle state trajectory with respect to the region boundaries. With these two features, the shiftable stability regions are feasible for real-time stability analysis.
Third, to keep the vehicle states (lateral velocity and yaw rate) always stay in the shiftable stability regions, different control methods are developed and evaluated. Based on different vehicle control configurations, two dynamic sliding mode controllers (SMC) are designed. To better control vehicle stability without suffering chattering issues in SMC, a non-overshooting model predictive control is proposed and applied. To further save computational burden for real-time implementation, time-varying control-dependent invariant sets and time-varying control-dependent barrier functions are proposed and adopted in a stability-guaranteed vehicle control problem.
Finally, to validate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed theories, definitions, and control methods, illustrative simulations and experimental results are presented and discussed.
ContributorsHuang, Yiwen (Author) / Chen, Yan (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Hyunglae (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Yong, Sze Zheng (Committee member) / Zhang, Wenlong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
In convective heat transfer processes, heat transfer rate increases generally with a large fluid velocity, which leads to complex flow patterns. However, numerically analyzing the complex transport process and conjugated heat transfer requires extensive time and computing resources. Recently, data-driven approach has risen as an alternative method to solve physical problems in a computational efficient manner without necessitating the iterative computations of the governing physical equations. However, the research on data-driven approach for convective heat transfer is still in nascent stage. This study aims to introduce data-driven approaches for modeling heat and mass convection phenomena. As the first step, this research explores a deep learning approach for modeling the internal forced convection heat transfer problems. Conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN) are trained to predict the solution based on a graphical input describing fluid channel geometries and initial flow conditions. A trained cGAN model rapidly approximates the flow temperature, Nusselt number (Nu) and friction factor (f) of a flow in a heated channel over Reynolds number (Re) ranging from 100 to 27750. The optimized cGAN model exhibited an accuracy up to 97.6% when predicting the local distributions of Nu and f. Next, this research introduces a deep learning based surrogate model for three-dimensional (3D) transient mixed convention in a horizontal channel with a heated bottom surface. Conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN) are trained to approximate the temperature maps at arbitrary channel locations and time steps. The model is developed for a mixed convection occurring at the Re of 100, Rayleigh number of 3.9E6, and Richardson number of 88.8. The cGAN with the PatchGAN based classifier without the strided convolutions infers the temperature map with the best clarity and accuracy.
Finally, this study investigates how machine learning analyzes the mass transfer in 3D printed fluidic devices. Random forests algorithm is hired to classify the flow images taken from semi-transparent 3D printed tubes. Particularly, this work focuses on laminar-turbulent transition process occurring in a 3D wavy tube and a straight tube visualized by dye injection. The machine learning model automatically classifies experimentally obtained flow images with an accuracy > 0.95.
ContributorsKang, Munku (Author) / Kwon, Beomjin (Thesis advisor) / Phelan, Patrick (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Rykaczewski, Konrad (Committee member) / Sohn, SungMin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Autonomous systems inevitably must interact with other surrounding systems; thus, algorithms for intention/behavior estimation are of great interest. This thesis dissertation focuses on developing passive and active model discrimination algorithms (PMD and AMD) with applications to set-valued intention identification and fault detection for uncertain/bounded-error dynamical systems. PMD uses the obtained input-output data to invalidate the models, while AMD designs an auxiliary input to assist the discrimination process. First, PMD algorithms are proposed for noisy switched nonlinear systems constrained by metric/signal temporal logic specifications, including systems with lossy data modeled by (m,k)-firm constraints. Specifically, optimization-based algorithms are introduced for analyzing the detectability/distinguishability of models and for ruling out models that are inconsistent with observations at run time. On the other hand, two AMD approaches are designed for noisy switched nonlinear models and piecewise affine inclusion models, which involve bilevel optimization with integer variables/constraints in the inner/lower level. The first approach solves the inner problem using mixed-integer parametric optimization, whose solution is included when solving the outer problem/higher level, while the second approach moves the integer variables/constraints to the outer problem in a manner that retains feasibility and recasts the problem as a tractable mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). Furthermore, AMD algorithms are proposed for noisy discrete-time affine time-invariant systems constrained by disjunctive and coupled safety constraints. To overcome the issues associated with generalized semi-infinite constraints due to state-dependent input constraints and disjunctive safety constraints, several constraint reformulations are proposed to recast the AMD problems as tractable MILPs. Finally, partition-based AMD approaches are proposed for noisy discrete-time affine time-invariant models with model-independent parameters and output measurement that are revealed at run time. Specifically, algorithms with fixed and adaptive partitions are proposed, where the latter improves on the performance of the former by allowing the partitions to be optimized. By partitioning the operation region, the problem is solved offline, and partition trees are constructed which can be used as a `look-up table' to determine the optimal input depending on revealed information at run time.
ContributorsNiu, Ruochen (Author) / Yong, Sze Zheng S.Z. (Thesis advisor) / Berman, Spring (Committee member) / Ren, Yi (Committee member) / Zhang, Wenlong (Committee member) / Zhuang, Houlong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022