| Summary: | Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2009. === This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. === Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis. === Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-118). === The aim of this analysis is to explore the fundamental stability issues of a robotic vehicle carrying out localization, mapping, and feedback control in a perturbation-filled environment. Motivated by the application of an ocean vehicle performing an autonomous ship hull inspection, a planar vehicle model performs localization using point features from a given map. Cases in which the agent must update the map are also considered. The stability of the marine robot controller and estimator duo is investigated using a pair of theorems requiring boundedness and convergence of the transition matrix Euclidean norm. These theorems yield a stability test for the feedback controller. Perturbations are then considered using a theorem on the convergence on the perturbed system transition matrix, yielding a robustness test for the estimator. Together, these tests form a set of tools which can be used in planning and evaluating the robustness of marine vehicle survey trajectories, which is demonstrated through experiment. An augmented A* kinodynamic path-planning algorithm is then implemented to search the control input space for the globally robustness-optimal survey trajectory. === by Brendan J. Englot. === S.M.
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