Wednesday: report planning …

Today trying to work out what I need to do to get my transfer report shipshape, and in a state to actually hand in. I have 5 distinct reports that need to be combined into one form:

• emergence
• flocking
• drafting
• complexity
• PSO

Whilst 4 of these can be woven pretty straightforwardly, I can see PSO being a pain…. Anyway, 1st things first, this is probably what I need to start on:

1. plan what the piece will actually look like — i.e. the physcial structure, Introduction, etc
2. review what I’ve actually written in the past: re-read what I’ve submitted, which could be painful!
3. update reports and turn into sections
4. re-write / edit sections.
5. blend
6. goto 4

Simple, eh? ;-) … Also need to find out a way to install Lyx on a USB, or a LaTeX editor at least …

More Thursday …

As WP was throwing one, a new post:

From Hybrid System Design for Formations of Autonomous Vehicles by Shannon Zelinski (http://www.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/~kootj/Publication/CDC03_ZKS_Final.pdf);

• Much work has been done on the stabilization of groups of vehicles for keeping formation, then references:

  • [1] J. A. Fax, R. M. Murray. “Graph Laplacians and Stabilization of Vehicle Formations”, CDS Technical Report 01-007. In Proceedings of IFAC World Congress, Barcelona, Spain, July 2002.

  • [2] A. Pant, P. Seiler, M. Broucke, T.J. Koo, J.K. Hedric. “Coordination and Control of Autonomous Vehicles”. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, March 2001.

  • [3] P. Tabuada, G. J. Pappas, P. Lima. “Feasible Formations of Multi-Agent Systems”. In Proceedings of the American Control Conference, pp.56-61, Arlington, VA, June 2001.

  • [4] N. E. Leonard, E. Fiorelli, “Virtual Leaders, Artificial Potentials and Coordinated Control of Groups”. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, pp.2968-2973, Orlando, FL, December 2001.

• … to be completed later !

   

   

Thursday’s thoughts …

Spoke with Will earlier today, and the thesis aim is there or thereabouts — woop! Will now start to bring the full report together, which is going to be a slog (I can tell) …

But first, more reading:

• PATH link: http://www.path.berkeley.edu/
• CE-CERT link: http://www.cert.ucr.edu/, found through http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7408697.stm
• as seen on this blog yesterday, looking at this paper: Decentralized Control of Autonomous Vehicles JS Baras, X Tan, P Hovareshti – egr.msu.edu  — thoughts:

  • A. Jadbabaie, J. Lin, and A. S. Morse, “Coordination of groups of mobile autonomous agents using nearest neighbor rules,” IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 48, no. 6, pp. 988–1001, 2003. — link http://www.eng.yale.edu/grouper/pdf/g3.pdf

  • H. G. Tanner, A. Jadbabaie, and G. J. Pappas, “Stable flocking of mobile agents, Part I: fixed topology,” in Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Maui, Hawaii, 2003. — hmmm that chap Tanner again, I note

• also as seen on this blog yesterday, looking at this: An Overview of Emerging Results in Cooperative UAV Control A Ryan, M Zennaro, A Howell, R Sengupta, JK … – Atlantis, 2004 – path.berkeley.edu — thoughts:

  •  ”Using a hybrid systems approach, a specific formation can be seen as a finite state machine, where transitions between different formations (or state machines) can be triggered by changes in mission or environment [38].“, where the ref. is http://www.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/~kootj/Publication/CDC03_ZKS_Final.pdf, from Hybrid System Design for Formations of Autonomous Vehicles
    S Zelinski, AO Modelling, TJ Koo, S Sastry – vuse.vanderbilt.edu

  • For a loosely defined formation such as a flock, reconfiguration may be inherent in the formation flight algorithm [22].  where the ref is R. Olfati-Saber and R. M. Murray, “Flocking with obstacle avoidance: cooperation with limited information in mobile networks”. Proc. IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, December 2003. from here http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=16501509236683661386, but Flocking for multi-agent dynamic systems: algorithms and theory R Olfati-Saber – Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on, 2006 – ieeexplore.ieee.org also looks good — who is this Olfati-Saber guy?

     

• very quickly: Flocking for Multi-Agent Dynamic Systems: Algorithms and Theory R Olfati-Saber – caltechcdstr.library.caltech.edu is 37 pages long, so one for a quiet evening … but does have a ref to an interesting looking Parrish ref, J. K. Parrish, S. V. Viscido, and D. Grunbaum. Self-organized fish schools: an examination of emergent properties. http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=3602172589754330067 

   

   

• in the Flocking with obstacle avoidance paper, Olfati-Saber: 

   

   

   

   

   

•  

  discusses Vicsek et al’s explicit equations behind Reynolds’ boids model ([6] T. Vicsek, A. Cziro´ok, E. Ben-Jacob, and O. Cohen, I. Shochet. Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-deriven particles. Physical Review Letters, 75(6):1226–1229, August, 1995.) mentioned a lot in papers, but I don’t think I’ve described it anywhere

•  

  • I may have broken WordPress — look out for crazy formatting imminently

  • this paper also hurt my head

Wednesay: more aim writing / tinkering …

More tinkering with the aim thesis today, with more wordsmithing than anything else …

However, have found some good looking links:

• this link Massimo Bertozzi, Alberto Broggi, and Alessandra Fascioli, VisLab and the Evolution of Vision-Based UGVs, IEEE Computer, 39(12):31-38, December 2006, ISSN: 0018-9162, PDF, doi:10.1109/MC.2006.448, BibTeX.  from http://www.ce.unipr.it/people/bertozzi/pap/?PHPSESSID=710006580f5bef5ec3737a38d7de1dac has good history of unmanned vehciles. Look at the snowcat studies
• another good Bertozzi link: Massimo Bertozzi, Alberto Broggi, and Alessandra Fascioli, Vision-based Intelligent Vehicles: state of the art and perspectives, Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 32(1):1-16, June 2000, PDF, BibTeX. again from http://www.ce.unipr.it/people/bertozzi/pap/?PHPSESSID=710006580f5bef5ec3737a38d7de1dac
• Computer in Dec 2006 http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/mags/co/&toc=comp/mags/co/2006/12/rztoc.xml seems to have interesting papers in it
• Rene Vidal http://cis.jhu.edu/people/faculty/vidal-cv.html and his  “Following the Flock: Distributed Formation Control with Omnidirectional Vision-Based Motion Segmentation and Visual Servoing“. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine 11. 4 (2004):14-20 paper from http://cis.jhu.edu/people/faculty/vidal-cv.html
• R. Vidal, O. Shakernia, S. Sastry. “Omnidirectional Vision-Based Formation Control“. Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control and Computing (2002):1637-1646 http://www.cis.jhu.edu/%7Ervidal/publications/allerton02-omniformation.pdf from http://cis.jhu.edu/people/faculty/vidal-cv.html shows vision based formations work
• some potentially important search terms:
  • vision-based
  • unmanned vehicle
  • ugv
• these 2 need to be read (found from this websearch: http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=%22unmanned+vehicles%22+%22fixed+topology%22):
  • [PDF] Decentralized Control of Autonomous Vehicles JS Baras, X Tan, P Hovareshti – egr.msu.edu
  • [PDF] An Overview of Emerging Results in Cooperative UAV Control A Ryan, M Zennaro, A Howell, R Sengupta, JK … – Atlantis, 2004 – path.berkeley.edu

Tuesday: re-writing thesis aim …

Today tried to do some general tidying up of what I’ve written before, edit some previously written sections, and then add in academic benefits / novelty section … which needs working on tomorrow!!

Tuesday: finding some string stability issue refs …

Ok, today I’m looking for something to include in my aim about vehicle following having issues … struggling to overcome researchers tendnecy to big up their research! Some quotes:

Need to find this paper: JK Hedrick, M Tomizuka and P Varaiya. Control issues in automated highway systems. IEEE Control Systems Magazine, 14(6): 21 – 32, Dec 1994

Seiler P., Sengupta R. An H_infinity Approach to Networked Control. Submitted as a regular paper to the IEEE transactions on automatic control in January 2003. (Article) — p2 “It has been noted that tracking performance improves if all following vehicles also use the state of the lead car for control [38]. ” … where ref 38 is D. Swaroop. String Stability of Interconnected Systems: An Application to Platooning in Automated Highway Systems. PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1994.

Couple of interesting looking links found on this page:

• Evaluation Tools for Automated Highway Systems.  A. Deshpande and P. Varaiya. Second European Workshop on Hybrid Systems, Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble. 1995. [postscript, 230K]
• This is a good overview of traffic problems and motivation of why AHS is coming: Automated highway systems: a technology for the 21st century. Pravin Varaiya, October 1997. [pdf, 699K]
• How to measure transportation system performance.  Pravin Varaiya, Nov. 1997. [pdf, 4730K]
• other papers on maximum flow at 60mph,

 Go look at these two (found through this search):

• [PDF] Information Flow and its relation to the stability of the motion of vehicles in a rigid formation Y Sai Krishna, S Darbha, KR Rajagopal – Proceedings of American Control Conference, 2005 – nt.ntnu.no
• Disturbance propagation in vehicle strings – all 6 versions » P Seiler, A Pant, K Hedrick – Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on, 2004 – ieeexplore.ieee.org

Monday Monday Monday, woo woo woo …

Today continuing to write up the thesis aim that was started last week. The draft I’ve got so far doesn’t look too bad (I think) but just needs some tweaking  / additional insight to make it a go-er.

Tonight have been looking at issues with vehicle platoons — see the following for perhaps more detail:

Control issues in automated highway systems – all 4 versions »
JK Hedrick, M Tomizuka, P Varaiya – Control Systems Magazine, IEEE, 1994 – ieeexplore.ieee.org
… In this paper we will not provide a complete review of AHS history. Another paper
in this issue, by RE Fenton, provides a more comprehensive review. …
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