Organisation: Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Università di Parma

Website: http://www.ce.unipr.it/people/lucac/

Address: Parco Area delle Scienze 181/A, 43121 Parma, Italy

Contact: Luca Consolini (Tel: +39 0521906114, luca.consolini(at)unipr.it )

Other Staff:

• Aurelio Piazzi (Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università di Parma)
• Corrado Guarino Lo Bianco (Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università di Parma)
• Alessandro Costalunga (Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Università di Parma)

Team Profile:

ACTLAB (Automatic ConTrol LABoratory) is at the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Parma, its activities involve theoretical research and experimentation in dynamic inversion, tracking and path following for nonlinear systems, formation control, control of mechanical systems, autonomous robotics, and mechatronic systems. The laboratory has been involved in European projects and in various industry research programs; it also actively collaborates with various Italian automation companies.

The team members are Luca Consolini, assistant professor in automatic control and team leader, Aurelio Piazzi, full professor of automatic control, Corrado Guarino Lo Bianco, assistant professor in automatic control, and Alessandro Costalunga, Ph.D. student.

The team has experience in most of the tasks required for the completion of challenge 3:

Task 1: the team has experience in vision-based observers for mobile robots, aimed at performing tracking and path-following tasks (see attached video 1 for the motion control of a Lego NXT based robot and video 2 for the control of an underactuated ship).

Task 2: the team has some experience in 3D environment reconstruction through disparity maps.

Task 3: The team has experience in tracking and path following problems for mechanical systems and mobile vehicles (see videos 1, 2 and references [1,3,6]). It has developed relevant theoretical results in the control of underactuated systems, in particular using nonlinear dynamic inversion (see [2]) and the virtual constraints approach (see [7]). The team has also worked on the control of the vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (see [2,4]).

Task 4: The team has experience on the solution of motion-planning problems for mobile vehicles in constrained environments using splines and level-set methods (see video 3 for a complex parking maneuver obtained thru level-set methods or reference [5] for a motion planning technique based on splines.)

List of references:

1. L. Consolini and M. Tosques. “A path-following problem for a class of non-holonomic control systems with noise,” Automatica, 41(6):1009–1016, 2005
2. L. Consolini and M. Tosques. “On the VTOL exact tracking with bounded internal dynamics via a Poincarè map approach,” IEEE Trans. On Automatic Control, 52(9):1757–1762, 2007
3. L. Consolini, F. Morbidi, D. Prattichizzo, and M. Tosques. “Leader-follower formation control of nonholonomic mobile robots with input constraints,” Automatica, 44(5):1343–1349, 2008
4. Luca Consolini, Manfredi Maggiore, Christopher Nielsen, and Mario Tosques. “Path following for the pvtol aircraft,” Automatica, 46(8):1284 – 1296, 2010
5. G. Lini, A. Piazzi and L. Consolini, "Multi-Optimization of η3-Splines for Autonomous Parking," IEEE joint CDC-ECC conference, pp. 6367-6372, 2011
6. L. Consolini and M. Tosques. “A minimum phase output in the exact tracking problem for the nonminimum phase underactuated surface ship,” Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on, 57(12):3174–3180, 2012
7. M. Maggiore and L. Consolini. “Virtual holonomic constraints for Euler-Lagrange systems,” Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on, 58(4):1001–1008