Publications (9)
Almost Global Asymptotic Trajectory Tracking for Fully-Actuated Mechanical Systems on Homogeneous Riemannian Manifolds
Jake Welde, Vijay Kumar
In this work, we address the design of tracking controllers that drive a mechanical system's state asymptotically towards a reference trajectory. Motivated by aerospace and robotic…
Scalable Distributed Nonlinear Control Under Flatness-Preserving Coupling
Fengjun Yang, Jake Welde, Nikolai Matni
We study distributed control for a network of nonlinear, differentially flat subsystems subject to dynamic coupling. Although differential flatness simplifies planning and control…
A Weak Notion of Symmetry for Dynamical Systems
Jake Welde, Pieter van Goor
Many nonlinear dynamical systems exhibit symmetry, affording substantial benefits for control design, observer architecture, and data-driven control. While the classical notion of…
Leveraging Symmetry to Accelerate Learning of Trajectory Tracking Controllers for Free-Flying Robotic Systems
Jake Welde, Nishanth Rao, Pratik Kunapuli +2
Tracking controllers enable robotic systems to accurately follow planned reference trajectories. In particular, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in the synthesis of co…
The Role of Symmetry in Constructing Geometric Flat Outputs for Free-Flying Robotic Systems
Jake Welde, Matthew D. Kvalheim, Vijay Kumar
Mechanical systems naturally evolve on principal bundles describing their inherent symmetries. The ensuing factorization of the configuration manifold into a symmetry group and an…
Leveling the Playing Field: Carefully Comparing Classical and Learned Controllers for Quadrotor Trajectory Tracking
Pratik Kunapuli, Jake Welde, Dinesh Jayaraman +1
Learning-based control approaches like reinforcement learning (RL) have recently produced a slew of impressive results for tasks like quadrotor trajectory tracking and drone racing…
Towards Automatic Identification of Globally Valid Geometric Flat Outputs via Numerical Optimization
Jake Welde, Vijay Kumar
Differential flatness enables efficient planning and control for underactuated robotic systems, but we lack a systematic and practical means of identifying a flat output (or determ…
A Compositional Approach to Certifying the Almost Global Asymptotic Stability of Cascade Systems
Jake Welde, Matthew D. Kvalheim, Vijay Kumar
In this work, we give sufficient conditions for the almost global asymptotic stability of a cascade in which the subsystems are only almost globally asymptotically stable. The resu…
Learning Flatness-Preserving Residuals for Pure-Feedback Systems
Fengjun Yang, Jake Welde, Nikolai Matni
We study residual dynamics learning for differentially flat systems, where a nominal model is augmented with a learned correction term from data. A key challenge is that generic re…