Yunfan Gao
PhD Candidate
Advanced Autonomous Systems Department
Robert Bosch GmbH, Corporate Research
Yunfan Gao obtained the bachelor degree in Electronic engineering from Fudan University, Shanghai, China in 2019. Then she took her master study in Robotics, Systems and Control at ETH Zurich, and graduated in January 2022. Her master thesis was about the integration of projection mapping with mobile robots. Recently in March 2022, she started carrying out a PhD at Bosch Research with the topic “Safety and Robustness in Mobile Robot Motion Planning”.
Project description
This PhD project is about motion planning for industrial robots and service robots. The aim is to run mobile robots efficiently with safety guaranteed. Currently, the common approach in industry to achieve safety is to deploy a separate safety controller. The controller alters the control commands made by the motion planner if necessary. This approach is too conservative as large portions of the space are marked as unsafe. To achieve safety in motion planning non-conservatively is challenging. Possible research directions include tighter integration between the motion planning and the safety control, prediction of surrounding agents’ trajectories, as well as real-time execution.
Frey, Jonathan; Gao, Yunfan; Messerer, Florian; Lahr, Amon; Zeilinger, Melanie N.; Diehl, Moritz
Efficient Zero-Order Robust Optimization for Real-Time Model Predictive Control with Acados Working paper
2023.
@workingpaper{frey_efficient_2023,
title = {Efficient Zero-Order Robust Optimization for Real-Time Model Predictive Control with Acados},
author = {Jonathan Frey and Yunfan Gao and Florian Messerer and Amon Lahr and Melanie N. Zeilinger and Moritz Diehl},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2311.04557},
year = {2023},
date = {2023-12-18},
abstract = {Robust and stochastic optimal control problem (OCP) formulations allow a systematic treatment of uncertainty, but are typically associated with a high computational cost. The recently proposed zero-order robust optimization (zoRO) algorithm mitigates the computational cost of uncertainty-aware MPC by propagating the uncertainties outside of the MPC problem. This paper details the combination of zoRO with the real-time iteration (RTI) scheme and presents an efficient open-source implementation in acados, utilizing BLASFEO for the linear algebra operations. In addition to the scaling advantages posed by the zoRO algorithm, the efficient implementation drastically reduces the computational overhead, and, combined with an RTI scheme, enables the use of tube-based MPC for a wider range of applications. The flexibility, usability and effectiveness of the proposed implementation is demonstrated on two examples. On the practical example of a differential drive robot, the proposed implementation results in a tenfold reduction of computation time with respect to the previously available zoRO implementation.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {workingpaper}
}
Gao, Yunfan; Messerer, Florian; Frey, Jonathan; Duijkeren, Niels; Diehl, Moritz
Collision-free Motion Planning for Mobile Robots by Zero-order Robust Optimization-based MPC Proceedings Article
In: 2023 European Control Conference (ECC), pp. 1-6, IEEE, Bucharest, Romania, 2023, ISBN: 978-3-907144-08-4.
@inproceedings{GaoCFMPECC23,
title = {Collision-free Motion Planning for Mobile Robots by Zero-order Robust Optimization-based MPC},
author = {Yunfan Gao and Florian Messerer and Jonathan Frey and Niels Duijkeren and Moritz Diehl},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10178311},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.23919/ECC57647.2023.10178311},
isbn = {978-3-907144-08-4},
year = {2023},
date = {2023-07-17},
urldate = {2023-07-17},
booktitle = {2023 European Control Conference (ECC)},
pages = {1-6},
publisher = {IEEE},
address = {Bucharest, Romania},
abstract = {This paper presents an implementation of robust model predictive control (MPC) for collision-free reference trajectory tracking for mobile robots. The presented approach considers the robot motion to be subject to process noise bounded by ellipsoidal sets. In order to efficiently handle the evolution of the disturbance ellipsoids within the MPC, the zero-order robust optimization (zoRO) scheme is applied [1]. The idea is to fix the disturbance ellipsoids within one optimization iteration and solve the problem repeatedly with updated disturbance ellipsoid trajectories. The zero-order approach is suboptimal in general. However, we show that it does not impair convergence to the reference trajectory in the absence of obstacles. The experiments on an industrial mobile robot prototype demonstrate the performance of the controller.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}