Biblio

Physical interaction of robots with their environment is a challenging problem because of the exchanged forces. Hybrid position/force control schemes often exhibit problems during the contact phase, whereas impedance control appears to be more simple and reliable, especially when impedance is shaped to be energetically passive. Even if recent technologies enable shaping the impedance of a robot, how best to plan impedance parameters for task execution remains an open question. In this paper we present an optimization-based approach to plan not only the robot motion but also its desired end-effector mechanical impedance. We show how our methodology is able to take into account the transition from free motion to a contact condition, typical of physical interaction tasks. Results are presented for planar and three-dimensional open-chain manipulator arms. The compositionality of mechanical impedance is exploited to deal with kinematic redundancy and multi-arm manipulation.

Statistical structure learning (SSL)-based approaches have been employed in the recent years to detect different types of anomalies in a variety of cyber-physical systems (CPS). Although these approaches outperform conventional methods in the literature, their computational complexity, need for large number of measurements and centralized computations have limited their applicability to large-scale networks. In this work, we propose a distributed, multi-agent maximum likelihood (ML) approach to detect anomalies in smart grid applications aiming at reducing computational complexity, as well as preserving data privacy among different players in the network. The proposed multi-agent detector breaks the original ML problem into several local (smaller) ML optimization problems coupled by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Then, these local ML problems are solved by their corresponding agents, eventually resulting in the construction of the global solution (network's information matrix). The numerical results obtained from two IEEE test (power transmission) systems confirm the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach for anomaly detection.

This work proposes a moving target defense (MTD) strategy to detect coordinated cyber-physical attacks (CCPAs) against power grids. A CCPA consists of a physical attack, such as disconnecting a transmission line, followed by a coordinated cyber attack that injects false data into the sensor measurements to mask the effects of the physical attack. Such attacks can lead to undetectable line outages and cause significant damage to the grid. The main idea of the proposed approach is to invalidate the knowledge that the attackers use to mask the effects of the physical attack by actively perturbing the grid's transmission line reactances using distributed flexible AC transmission system (D-FACTS) devices. We identify the MTD design criteria in this context to thwart CCPAs. The proposed MTD design consists of two parts. First, we identify the subset of links for D-FACTS device deployment that enables the defender to detect CCPAs against any link in the system. Then, in order to minimize the defense cost during the system's operational time, we use a game-theoretic approach to identify the best subset of links (within the D-FACTS deployment set) to perturb which will provide adequate protection. Extensive simulations performed using the MATPOWER simulator on IEEE bus systems verify the effectiveness of our approach in detecting CCPAs and reducing the operator's defense cost.

This study proposes to apply an efficient formulation to solve the stochastic security-constrained generation capacity expansion planning (GCEP) problem using an improved method to directly compute the generalized generation distribution factors (GGDF) and the line outage distribution factors (LODF) in order to model the pre- and the post-contingency constraints based on the only application of the partial transmission distribution factors (PTDF). The classical DC-based formulation has been reformulated in order to include the security criteria solving both pre- and post-contingency constraints simultaneously. The methodology also takes into account the load uncertainty in the optimization problem using a two-stage multi-period model, and a clustering technique is used as well to reduce load scenarios (stochastic problem). The main advantage of this methodology is the feasibility to quickly compute the LODF especially with multiple-line outages (N-m). This idea could speed up contingency analyses and improve significantly the security-constrained analyses applied to GCEP problems. It is worth to mentioning that this approach is carried out without sacrificing optimality.