ASCAR

Autonomous Robotic Systems are becoming ubiquitous in modern society. They are revolutionizing how a wide range of security, commercial, and environmental monitoring applications are undertaken. Because these applications tend to involve a multitude of AR vehicles that perform multiple tasks in various three-dimensional environments, effective integration of high performance and unified Guidance, Navigation, and Control is utterly needed. The advancement of generic Guidance, Navigation, and Control tools and design methods, offering improved robustness and stability, will significantly benefit the development of high-performance and safe Autonomous Systems. The physical laws governing the motion of Autonomous Robotic Systems involve natural symmetries reflected in sensory measurements and external forces applied to the vehicles that present invariance and/or equivariance properties. ASCAR project will exploit this structure explicitly by developing design principles and methods tailored for systems with symmetries. More specifically, the project will establish i) a new paradigm of Guidance and Control for Autonomous Systems that seamlessly integrates, in a unified framework, modeling, control, and optimization design procedures, ii) a framework for Navigation that integrates situation awareness for the analysis and design of efficient and reliable state observers for general systems with symmetries, and iii) a new paradigm and new tools for robust sensor-based control. Two existing platforms will be exploited during the project's life: a quadrotor UAV and a convertible aerial vehicle to run experimentations involving various scenarios and environments and evaluate the results inspired by the proposed research. The project outcomes will provide engineers with an effective approach to designing efficient and computationally tractable Guidance, Navigation, and Control systems for a large class of Autonomous Systems accomplishing a variety of real-world applications.