Prof. Malisoff's Marine Robotics Projects
This research develops mathematical
methods for controlling
marine robots. It began as a collaboration with Professor Fumin Zhang
from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and currently involves
Dr. Corina Barbalata from the LSU College of Engineering.
It includes
mathematical control theory
and real time experimental field work using actual marine robots.
The
long term objectives are to develop marine robotic methods that are
adaptive, fault tolerant, repeatable, robust to
uncertainty, and scalable to heterogeneous fleets of autonomous underwater
vehicles. Marine robots are useful because of the hazards and high costs
associated with conventional human-based marine
surveys. The methods from my projects retrieved water and
sediment samples, to help monitor the long term impacts of environment disasters,
hazards, and stresses.
The projects began in
September 2010, in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf
of Mexico. They included 3 weeks of
field work at Grand Isle, Louisiana during the summer of 2011, in a region
that was heavily polluted by the oil spill.
A total of 14 students worked on the project, including 9 undergraduates.
Ten were members of the Georgia
Tech Savannah Robotics Team, 3 were from the College of William and Mary,
and 1 was from LSU.
The field work used several robotic vehicles, including
2 that were built by the Georgia Tech team. Georgia Tech used their
surface vehicle Victoria, and their underwater vehicle ROV Beta.
Mark Patterson from the Virginia Institute of
Marine Science used two versions of his underwater vehicle Fetch.
The water and sediment samples from Grand Isle were
checked for contaminants by Prof. Ed
Overton from the LSU School of the Coast and Environment, and the research
produced crude oil concentration maps.
The students benefited
from hands on training involving cutting edge control research that would
not otherwise have been available.
Our current work aims to better understand how to compensate for
delays, which result from unfriendly sea conditions.
Our techniques involve
Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals, nonlinear tracking controllers,
input constraints, and robust forward
invariance.
The research can help protect marine ecosystems by
improving responses to hazards such
as oil spills. Here are the vehicles used in the Grand Isle field work:

From left to right, they are VIMS Fetch 3.5,
the YSI Ecomapper (a commercial vehicle), ASV-Victoria, ROV-Beta, and
VIMS Fetch 1. Click here for an
enlarged photo of the vehicles. Here is a
crude oil concentration map that was generated by the projects:
Here are some publications that were sponsored in part by our projects. The people whose names are
underlined were students when the paper was written.
- Zhang, F.,
Cyber-Maritime Cycle: Autonomy of Marine Robots for Ocean Sensing, Now Publishers, Boston, MA, 2017.
- Malisoff, M., R. Sizemore, and F. Zhang, "Robustness of adaptive
control for three-dimensional curve tracking under state constraints:
effects of scaling control terms," in Proceedings of the 55th IEEE
Conference on Decision and Control (Las Vegas, NV, 12-14 December 2016),
pp. 3825-3830.
- Malisoff, M., and F. Zhang,
"Adaptive planar curve tracking control with unknown curvature,"
in
Proceedings of the
2016 American Control Conference (Boston, MA, 6-8
July 2016), pp. 1608-1612.
- Malisoff, M., and F. Zhang, "Robustness of adaptive
control under time delays for
three-dimensional curve tracking,'' SIAM Journal on Control
and Optimization, Volume 53, Number 4, 2015, pp. 2203-2236.
- Mukhopadhyay, S., C. Wang, M. Patterson, M. Malisoff,
and F. Zhang, "Collaborative autonomous surveys in
marine environments affected by oil spills," in
Cooperative Robots
and Sensor Networks 2014,
A. Koubaa and A. Khelil, Eds.,
Studies in Computational Intelligence Series Vol. 554, Springer, New York, 2014, pp. 87-113.
- Szwaykowska, K., and
F. Zhang, "Trend
and bounds for error growth in controlled Lagrangian particle tracking,"
IEEE Transactions on Oceanic Engineering, Volume 39, Issue 1, January
2014, pp. 10-25.
- Malisoff, M., and F. Zhang, "An adaptive control
design for 3D curve tracking based on robust forward invariance,"
in
Proceedings of the
52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Florence, Italy, 10-13 December 2013), pp. 4473-4478.
- Wu, W., F. Zhang, and Y. Wardi, "Energy-information tradeoffs
in motion and sensing for target
localization," in Proceedings of the 2013 European Control Conference
(Zurich, Switzerland, 17-19 July 2013), pp. 1250-1255.
- Yang, H., C. Wang, and F. Zhang, "Robust
geometric formation control of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles
with time delays," in Proceedings of the American Control
Conference (Washington, DC, 17-19 June 2013), pp. 1382-1387.
- Malisoff, M., and F. Zhang, "Robustness of a
class of three-dimensional curve tracking control laws under time delays
and polygonal state constraints,'' in Proceedings of the
American Control Conference (Washington, DC, 17-19 June 2013), pp.
5690-5695.
- Malisoff, M., and F. Zhang, "Adaptive control for planar
curve tracking under controller uncertainty,'' Automatica, Volume 49, Issue 5, May 2013, pp. 1411-1418.
- Wu, W., and F. Zhang, "A switching strategy for target
tracking by mobile sensing agents," Journal of Communications,
Volume 8, Number 1, January 2013, pp. 47-54.
- Wu, W., and F. Zhang, "Coherent steps of mobile sensing agents in Gaussian scalar fields,"
in
Proceedings of the
51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Maui, HI, 10-13 December 2012), pp. 2814-2819.
-
Mukhopadhyay, S., C. Wang, S. Bradshaw, V. Bazie, S. Maxon, L. Hicks,
M. Patterson, and F. Zhang,
"Controller performance of marine robots in reminiscent oil surveys,"
in Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, 7-12
October 2012), pp. 1766-1771.
- Wu, W., I. Couzin, and F. Zhang, "Bio-inspired source seeking with no
explicit gradient estimation," in Proceedings of the 3rd IFAC
Workshop on Distributed Estimation and Control in Networked Systems
(Santa Barbara, CA, 14-15 September 2012), pp. 240-245.
- Malisoff, M., and F. Zhang, "Adaptive controllers and robustness
analysis for curve tracking with unknown control gains,"
in Proceedings of the
2012 American Control Conference (Montreal, Canada, 27-29 June 2012),
pp. 344-349.
- Yang, H., and F. Zhang, "Robust control of formation dynamics for autonomous underwater vehicles in horizontal plane,"
Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control, Volume 134, Issue 3,
Paper 031009.
- Malisoff, M., F. Mazenc, and F. Zhang, "Stability and robustness analysis for curve tracking control using input-to-state stability,"
IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Volume 57, Issue 5, May 2012, pp. 1320-1326.
- Wu, W., and F. Zhang, "Explorability of noisy scalar fields," in Proceedings of the 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control
Conference (Orlando, FL, 12-15 December 2011), pp. 6439-6444.
- Malisoff, M., F. Mazenc, and F. Zhang, "Input-to-state stability
for curve tracking control: A constructive approach," in
Proceedings of the 2011 American
Control Conference (San Francisco, CA, 29 June-1 July 2011), pp. 1984-1989.
- Yang, H., and F. Zhang, "Control of horizontal formation dynamics for autonomous
underwater vehicles," in Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Shanghai, China, 9-13 May 2011), pp. 3364-3369.
The preceding works were sponsored in part by the US National Science Foundation
Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems,
as part of the Energy, Power, and Adaptive Systems Program, under grants
1056253,
1056255, or 1102348. Here are home pages for
some of the project participants and their co-authors:
- Valerie Bazie
- Steve Bradshaw
- Lisa Hicks
- Michael Malisoff
- Shayok Mukhopadhyay
- Mark Patterson
- Chuanfeng Wang
- Fumin Zhang
Three MS students (Lisa Hicks, Valerie Bazie,
and Steve Bradshaw) and one undergraduate (Michael Bunch) who worked on
the projects went on to work for Toyota or General Motors. Here
are news reports about the projects and its participants:
- April 2011 Poster
- One Minute YouTube
Video
- Six Minute YouTube Video
- LSU Gold Article
- LSU
College of Science News
- Georgia Tech ECE Report
- January 2012 Baton Rouge Advocate Article
- LSU Mathematics News
- WSB
Report
- WOKV Report
- WJAC-TV Report
- Times Union Article
- Vicksburg Post Article
- Houston Chronicle
Article
- Beaumont Enterprise Article
- San Antonio Express-News Article
- Mashable Article
- April 2012 Pursuit Article
- April 2012 APEGGA Peg Article
- 2012 RoboBoat Competition Report
- LSU College of Science Strategic Plan
- February 2013 LSU Media Center News
- May 2013 Pursuit Article
- June 2013 SEE Innovation Research.gov Report
- February 2014 UTSA Presentation
- March 2014 Rainmaker Award
- April 2014 College of Science E-News
- ASV-Victoria "Robots For Good" Poster
- Summer 2014 LSU Alumni Magazine
- Wencen Wu's CPS Synergy Grant
- August 2014 CMMI and EPCN Announcement
- Fall 2014 LSU ORED Magazine Article
Thank you
for
your interest in our project!
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