IRP-ARS

Franco-Australian International Research Program in Autonomous Robotic Systems

IRP-ARS
2020-2024
Contact:
Pr. Tarek Hamel
thamel(at)i3s.unice.fr

Pr. Robert Mahony
robert.mahony(at)anu.edu.au

IRP-ARS
News

Introduction

The Franco-Australian IRP-ARS (Advanced Autonomy for Robotic Systems) is managed by Professor Tarek Hamel (I3S UMR-CNRS 7271, Côte d’Azur University) in collaboration with Professor Robert Mahony  (Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, Australian National University) and started in 2020.

Missions and research themes

During the last two decades important progress has been made in the development of advanced methods for motion control of unmanned autonomous robotic systems.  The commercial landscape of these vehicles is characterized by a plethora of small start-up companies proposing an increasing variety of devices for various applications. This rapidly growing market has boosted research studies in the field of autonomous robotic systems, particularly from the Systems and Control community.

The objective of the IRP-ARS is to pool the top-level resources of research institutions from both France and Australia and build an excellence centre  to go beyond the state of the art in systems and control theory applied to Unmanned Robotic Systems. It will be built on existing collaborations and it will establish new ones between the top-level research entities.

Theoretical open problems with high impact in practical applications will be addressed to enable Unmanned Robotic Systems to operate more robustly and more reliably in complex and cluttered dynamic environments encountered in real-world applications. These aims will be achieved by meeting the following objectives:

  • Develop a unified control approach of a large class of Unmanned Robotic Systems (Airplanes, helicopters and other Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) vehicles, blimps, rockets, hydroplanes, ships and submarines are generally underactuated)
  • Develop a unifying scientific framework for the analysis and design of observers for general systems with symmetry of the system with high quality state estimation (position, velocity, orientation, etc.).

Exploit the latest advances in deep learning to develop ‘front-end’ sensor processing that directly integrates into globally well-defined control and perception algorithms for systems with symmetry.

MAIN projects of research

• National Projects (Equipex, 2 ANR, 1 FUI, 1 DGA-Rapid, Compagnies (ECA-Robotics, Eurocopter))

institutions and laboratories involved

France
• Professor Tarek Hamel. I3S UMR-CNRS 7271, Côte d’Azur University (leader of the French part), CRAN UMR-CNRS 7039, Université de Lorraine and IRISA UMR -CNRS 6074, Rennes.

Australia
• Professor Robert Mahony. Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, Australian National University (leader of the Australian part), the University of Melbourne and Monash University.

PUBLICATIONS

M-D. Hua, J. Trumpf, T. Hamel, R. Mahony and P. Morin, Nonlinear observer design on SL(3) for homography estimation by exploiting point and line correspondences with application to image stabilization. Automatica, Volume 115, May 2020, 108858.

  1. Van Goor, R. Mahony, Tarek Hamel and J. Trumpf, An Observer Design for Visual Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping with Output Equivariance. IFAC World Congress, Berlin: Germany, 2020.

Granzotto, R. Postoyan, L. Busoniu, D. Nesic and J. Daafouz, Finite-horizon discounted optimal control: stability and performance, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, available on-line.

A.I. Maass, D. Nesic, R. Postoyan and P.M. Dower, Observer design for non-linear networked control systems with persistently exciting protocols, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, available on-line.

  1. Astolfi, R. Postoyan and D. Nesic, Uniting observers, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, available on-line.
  2. Wang, R. Postoyan, D. Nesic and W.P.M.H. Heemels, Periodic event-triggered control for nonlinear networked control systems, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 65 (2), 620-635, 2020.

L. Cuevas, D. Nesic, C. Manzie and R. Postoyan, A multi-observer approach for parameter and state estimation of nonlinear systems with slowly varying parameters, IFAC World Congress, Berlin: Germany, 2020.

M-D. Hua, J. Trumpf, T. Hamel, R. Mahony and P. Morin, Nonlinear observer design on SL(3) for homography estimation by exploiting point and line correspondences with application to image stabilization. Automatica, Volume 115, May 2020, 108858.

S. De Marco, MD Hua, R Mahony, T Hamel, Homography estimation of a moving planar scene from direct point correspondence, IEEE Transaction on Control Systems Technology, to appear.

P. Van Goor, R. Mahony, T. Hamel and J. Trumpf, An Observer Design for Visual Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping with Output Equivariance. IFAC World Congress, Berlin: Germany, 2020.

 P. Van Goor, T. Hamel, R. Mahony, Equivariant Filter (EqF): A General Filter Design for Systems on Homogeneous Spaces. CDC (IEEE Conference on Decision and Control), Jeju Island: South Korea, 2020.

 Y. Ng, P. van Goor, T. Hamel, R. Mahony, Equivariant Systems Theory and Observer Design for Second Order Kinematic Systems on Matrix Lie Groups, CDC (IEEE Conference on Decision and Control), Jeju Island: South Korea, 2020.

Granzotto, R. Postoyan, L. Busoniu, D. Nesic and J. Daafouz, Finite-horizon discounted optimal control: stability and performance, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, available on-line.

A.I. Maass, D. Nesic, R. Postoyan and P.M. Dower, Observer design for non-linear networked control systems with persistently exciting protocols, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, available on-line.

D. Astolfi, R. Postoyan and D. Nesic, Uniting observers, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, available on-line.

W. Wang, R. Postoyan, D. Nesic and W.P.M.H. Heemels, Periodic event-triggered control for nonlinear networked control systems, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 65 (2), 620-635, 2020.

L. Cuevas, D. Nesic, C. Manzie and R. Postoyan, A multi-observer approach for parameter and state estimation of nonlinear systems with slowly varying parameters, IFAC World Congress, Berlin: Germany, 2020.

S.H.J. Heijmans, R. Postoyan, D. Nesic and W.P.M.H. Heemels, An average allowable transmission interval condition for the stability of networked control systems, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, available on-line.

W. Wang, D. Nesic, R. Postoyan, W.P.M.H. Heemels, A unifying event-triggered control framework based on a hybrid small-gain theorem, CDC (IEEE Conference on Decision and Control), Jeju Island: South Korea, 2020.

A. I. Maass, D. Nesic, V.S. Varma, R. Postoyan, S. Lasaulce, Stochastic stabilisation and power control for nonlinear feedback loops communicating over lossy wireless networks, CDC (IEEE Conference on Decision and Control), Jeju Island: South Korea, 2020.

Awards:

The Editor’s Choice paper for May 2020:” It is my pleasure to recommend a paper that starts with the Special Linear group SL(3) and its algebra and culminates with captivating YouTube videos that demonstrate an efficient algorithm for image stabilization. The journey from SL(3), through nonlinear observers on the corresponding manifold using point and line correspondences as measurements, to YouTube is fascinating”

M-D. Hua, J. Trumpf, T. Hamel, R. Mahony and P. Morin, Nonlinear observer design on SL(3) for homography estimation by exploiting point and line correspondences with application to image stabilization. Automatica, Volume 115, May 2020, 108858

The Kimura best paper award for, September 2020: 

M‐D. Hua, J. Trumpf, T. Hamel, R. Mahony and P. Morin, Feature-based Recursive Observer Design for Homography  Estimation and its Application to Image Stabilization, Asian Journal of Control, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 1443-1458, July 2019.