Published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems
Airborne wind energy (AWE) is a fascinating technology to convert wind power into electricity with an autonomous tethered aircraft. Deemed a potentially game-changing solution, AWE is attracting the attention of policy makers and stakeholders with the promise of producing large amounts of cost-competitive electricity with wide applicability worldwi...
Published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems
Medical robotics is a rapidly advancing discipline that is leading the evolution of robot-assisted surgery, personalized rehabilitation and assistance, and hospital automation. In China, both research and commercial developments in medical robotics have undergone exponential growth in recent years. In this review, we first give an overview of the c...
Published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems
One potential application of multirobot systems is collective transport, a task in which multiple robots collaboratively move a payload that is too large or heavy for a single robot. In this review, we highlight a variety of control strategies for collective transport that have been developed over the past three decades. We characterize the problem...
Published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems
Power grids are critical infrastructure in modern society, and there are well-established theories for the stability and control of traditional power grids under a centralized paradigm. Driven by environmental and sustainability concerns, power grids are undergoing an unprecedented transition, with much more flexibility as well as uncertainty broug...
Published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems
An estimated 11% of adults report experiencing some form of cognitive decline, which may be associated with conditions such as stroke or dementia and can impact their memory, cognition, behavior, and physical abilities. While there are no known pharmacological treatments for many of these conditions, behavioral treatments such as cognitive t...
Published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems
A colloidal system is a large collection of micrometer-sized particles suspended in a liquid, and the state of the system can be measured in real time, using imaging techniques and image processing. The assembly of the particles is driven by interactions between the particles and the surrounding liquid, as well as by external fields, including elec...
Published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems
The design and control of autonomous systems that operate in uncertain or adversarial environments can be facilitated by formal modeling and analysis. Probabilistic model checking is a technique to automatically verify, for a given temporal logic specification, that a system model satisfies the specification, as well as to synthesize an optimal str...
Published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems
Those designing autonomous systems that interact with humans will invariably face questions about how humans think and make decisions. Fortunately, computational cognitive science offers insight into human decision-making using tools that will be familiar to those with backgrounds in optimization and control (e.g., probability theory, statistical m...
Published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems
Continuum robots can traverse anatomical pathways to intervene in regions deep inside the human body. They are able to steer along 3D curves in confined spaces and dexterously handle tissues. Concentric tube robots (CTRs) are continuum robots that comprise a series of precurved elastic tubes that can be translated and rotated with respect to each o...
Published in Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems
The so-called Stefan system describes the dynamical model of the liquid–solid phase change in materials ranging from water and ice in the polar caps to metal casting and additive manufacturing (3D printing). The mathematical structure is given by a partial differential equation (PDE) with a moving boundary governed by a scalar ordinary differential...
