Resilience in Control and Motion Planning for Autonomous robots

• Main Author: Nguyen, Dinh Huan
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English

Recent advances in autonomy research have enabled the widespread adoption of robots in multiple applications including for subterranean exploration, construction, agriculture, parcel delivery, and forestry. However, instilling reliability and resilience in autonomous robotic operations in a diverse set of challenging, geometrically complex, and perceptually-degraded environments remains demanding. Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to study core elements of the Science of Resilient Robotic Autonomy from several perspectives to pave the way for the resilient design paradigm in robotics. In pursuit of this goal, this thesis encompasses three distinct parts that address resilience in control, motion planning, and robotic systems. Part I contains research on the design, modeling, and control of a new type of aerial robot and a survey on the application and design considerations of Model Predictive Control (MPC) for aerial robots. Part II presents research on resilient learning-based navigation methods for autonomous robots. Part III discusses resilience in autonomous robotic systems, including an individual aerial robot for cave exploration and eventually a robotic system-of-systems in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge Final Event through Team CERBERUS. This thesis presents seven novel contributions allowing us to break new ground in the Science of Resilient Robotic Autonomy. Three of these are based on articles submitted or published in peer-review journals, and four are based on articles published in peer-reviewed conference proceedings. Other publications that the candidate contributed during this PhD (but are not directly related to the content of the chapters) are also listed. The first chapter discusses the system design, modeling, and control of a novel aerial robotic system. This novel robot design offers the potential to simultaneously carry a significant payload (including sensing and processing units), perform forceful physical interaction, and morph its shape in a versatile manner in order to negotiate narrow areas. A hybrid modeling framework including Free-flight and Aerial Manipulation modes is proposed to model the system and respective controllers are designed for both operating modes with stability guarantees provided by Lyapunov theory and numerically verified with reachability analysis. We demonstrate the stability and performance of a prototype system in a series of experimental studies including a task of valve rotation, a pick-and-rele