Non-smooth dynamic modeling and simulation of an unmanned bicycle on a curved pavement

The non-smooth dynamic model of an unmanned bicycle is established to study the contact-separate and stick-slip non-smooth phenomena between wheels and the ground. According to the Carvallo-Whipple configuration, the unmanned bicycle is reduced to four rigid bodies, namely, rear wheel, rear frame, front fork, and front wheel, which are connected by perfect revolute joints. The interaction between each wheel and the ground is simplified as the normal contact force and the friction force at the contact point, and these forces are described by the Hunt-Crossley contact force model and the LuGre friction force model, respectively. According to the characteristics of flat and curved pavements, calculation methods for contact forces and their generalized forces are presented. The dynamics of the system is modeled by the Lagrange equations of the first kind, a numerical solution algorithm of the dynamic equations is presented, and the Baumgarte stabilization method is used to restrict the drift of the constraints. The correctness of the dynamic model and the numerical algorithm is verified in comparison with the previous studies. The feasibility of the proposed model is demonstrated by simulations under different motion states.

SOME PROBLEMS ABOUT THE MOTION OF A RIGID BODY IN A RESISTIVE MEDIUM

The dynamics of rotating rigid bodies is a classical topic of study in mechanics. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several aspects of a rotating rigid body motion were studied by famous mathematicians as Euler, Jacobi, Poinsot, Lagrange, and Kovalevskya. However, the study of the dynamics of rotating bodies of still important for aplications such as the dynamics of satellite-gyrostat, spacecraft, re-entry vehicles, theory of gyroscopes, modern technology, navigation, space engineering and many other areas. A number of studies are devoted to the dynamics of a rigid body in a resistive medium. The presence of the velocity of proper rotation of the rigid body leads to the apearance of dissipative torques causing the braking of the body rotation. These torques depend on the properties of resistant medium in which the rigid body motions occur, on the body shape, on the properties of the surface of the rigid body and the distribution of mass in the body and on the characters of the rigid body motion. Therefore, the dependence of the resistant torque on the orientation of the rigid body and its angular velocity can de quite complicated and requires consideration of the motion of the medium around the body in the general case. We confine ourselves in this paper to some simple relations that can qualitative describe the resistance to rigid body rotation at small angular velocities and are used in the literature. In setting up the equations of motion of a rigid body moving in viscous medium, we need to consider the nature of the resisting force generated by the motion of the rigid body. The evolution of rotations of a rigid body influenced by dissipative disturbing torques were studied in many papers and books. The problems of motion of a rigid body about fixed point in a resistive medium described by nonlinear dynamic Euler equations. An analytical solution of the problem when the torques of external resistance forces are proportional to the corresponding projections of the angular velocity of the rigid body is obtain in several works. The dependence of the dissipative torque of the resistant forces on the angular velocity vector of rotation of the rigid body is assumed to be linear. We consider dynamics of a rigid body with arbitrary moments of inertia subjected to external torques include small dissipative torques.

Behavior model of an intelligent agent based on a genetic algorithm

A solution of improving the behavior model of a non-player character as an intelligent agent by optimizing input parameters based on a genetic algorithm is presented. The proposed approach includes the development of a non-player character model: a skeleton, rigid bodies, the implementation of a dynamic model based on the Featherstone algorithm, and modeling of the character's behavior based on a genetic algorithm. The formation of a behavior model using a genetic algorithm that simulates the physical properties of a character, taking into account his actions, is proposed. The stages of the genetic algorithm include creating an initial population, fitness score, selection, crossing and mutation. Based on the results of the experiments, the input parameters of the non-player character behavior model were determined, maximizing the cumulative fitness score, which acts as an estimate of the reward, which can be used as initial values for further experiments. Keywords: non-player character, intelligent agent, simulation, genetic algorithm

Handwriting-Assistant

Pen-based handwriting has become one of the major human-computer interaction methods. Traditional approaches either require writing on the specific supporting device like the touch screen, or limit the way of using the pen to pure rotation or translation. In this paper, we propose Handwriting-Assistant, to capture the free handwriting of ordinary pens on regular planes with mm-level accuracy. By attaching the inertial measurement unit (IMU) to the pen tail, we can infer the handwriting on the notebook, blackboard or other planes. Particularly, we build a generalized writing model to correlate the rotation and translation of IMU with the tip displacement comprehensively, thereby we can infer the tip trace accurately. Further, to display the effective handwriting during the continuous writing process, we leverage the principal component analysis (PCA) based method to detect the candidate writing plane, and then exploit the distance variation of each segment relative to the plane to distinguish on-plane strokes. Moreover, our solution can apply to other rigid bodies, enabling smart devices embedded with IMUs to act as handwriting tools. Experiment results show that our approach can capture the handwriting with high accuracy, e.g., the average tracking error is 1.84mm for letters with the size of about 2cmx1cm, and the average character recognition rate of recovered single letters achieves 98.2% accuracy of the ground-truth recorded by touch screen.

Time-Varying Formation Control for Heterogeneous Planar Underactuated Multi-Vehicle Systems

This paper presents a distributed control approach for time-varying formation of heterogeneous planar underactuated vehicle networks without global position measurements. All vehicles in the network are modeled as generic three degree of freedom planar rigid bodies with two control inputs, and are allowed to have non-identical dynamics. Feasible trajectories are generated for each vehicle using the nonholonomic constraints of the vehicle dynamics. By exploiting the cascaded structure of the planar vehicle model, a transformation is introduced to define the reduced order error dynamics, and then, a sliding-mode control law is proposed. Low level controller for each vehicle is derived such that it only requires relative position and local motion information of its neighbors in a given directed communication network. The proposed formation control law guarantees the uniform global asymptotic stability (UGAS) of the closed-loop system subject to bounded uncertainties and disturbances. The proposed approach can be applied to underactuated vehicle networks consisting of mobile robots, surface vessels and planar aircraft. Simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.