This is part of a series of posts that summarize my meetings with Professor Ian M. Mitchell for our own records.
During the second meeting, on January 26th, we reviewed the previous week’s analysis of the state of the target problem and better defined the short-term plan for the course.
Further investigation of recent publications relating to autonomous sailboats show that there is a lot of room for improvement not only in regards to obstacle avoidance but also controller design. As part of my work for UBC Sailbot, I developed control algorithms that overcome the weaknesses put forward by presently published papers. The first step is to evaluate my controller vs others in a well-defined set of scenarios.
Before being able to evaluate the aforementioned controllers, I need to strengthen my formal knowledge of control system design and analysis. This will also require the study of Ordinary Differential Equations.
Goals for the upcoming week
- Define scenarios in which controllers will be evaluated
- Describe problem state space
- Study Ordinary Differential Equations
- Evaluate existing controllers in MATLAB
- Note: ODE45 might be a good fit
- Continue developing models for vehicle dynamics
- Continue work on a reading list
Other notes
- Luc Jaulin might be a valuable contact