November 20, 2019: Invited Speaker Seminar: Constrained Control of UVs

Dr. Giuseppe Franzè
University of Calabria

Wednesday, November 20, 2019 at 11:00 am
Room EV011.119

Abstract

In the first part of this talk, a receding horizon control scheme is presented for solving the obstacle avoidance motion planning problem of autonomous ground vehicles operating in uncertain dynamic environments. In particular, a set-theoretic based control architecture is proposed to deal with disturbance effects, input, and state constraints. It will be shown that the resulting scheme guarantees Uniformly Ultimate Boundedness and constraints fulfillment regardless of any admissible obstacle configuration. In the second part, an obstacle avoidance control scheme for autonomous aerial vehicles is presented. The strategy is based on command governor (CG) ideas that are extended to take into account nonconvex constraints typically arising in path planning obstacle avoidance problems. Experimental results on the Quanser quadrotor Qball-X4 are shown to confirm the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Biography

Dr. Giuseppe Franzè received his Laurea degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Calabria, Italy, in 1994 and his Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering from the same University in 1999. From 1994 to 2002, he was a Research Associate in the DEIS Department of the University of Calabria. From December 2002 to January 2015 he was an Assistant Professor in the same Department. Since January 2015, he is an Associate Professor in the DIMES Department of the University of Calabria. Since January 2018, he is the Director of the Master Degree Program in Automation Engineering at the University of Calabria.

Dr. Franzè is the author of more than 150 papers published in refereed international journals and conference proceedings. His main scientific interests include constrained predictive control, control reconfiguration for fault-tolerant systems, networked control systems, supervision approaches for remote control of dynamic systems over communication data networks, obstacle avoidance problems for autonomous vehicles, resilient control under cyber-attacks.

Since 2019, he is a senior member of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and he is currently serving as an Associate Editor of the IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica (JAS). He has served as IPC and session chair in several international IEEE and IFAC conferences. In October 2014, Dr. Franzè obtained the Scientific National Qualification as Full Professor.