Artificial Intelligence techniques have developed into a transformative force across many industries. Their industrial adaption in aerospace Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) systems, however, has been rather limited to date. The “Artificial Intelligence for Guidance, Navigation and Control” (AI4GNC) project led by SENER Aeroespacial and funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) investigates the potential of several machine learning methods to enhance the performance and robustness of an aerospace GNC design.…

The trend toward onboard autonomy and spacecraft minimization present significant potential for advances in efficient Line of Sight management by making optimal use of the limited torque resources available. At SENER Aeroespacial, we are implementing AOCS algorithms capable of providing agility in different observation scenarios in which the exploitation of the resources is fundamental for the mission success. In this contribution, we present an in-house optimization toolbox for onboard guidance, the SENER Optimiz…

Learning-based model predictive control has been widely applied in autonomous racing to improve the closed-loop behaviour of vehicles in a data-driven manner. When environmental conditions change, e.g., due to rain, often only the predictive model is adapted, but the controller parameters are kept constant. However, this can lead to suboptimal behaviour. In this paper, we address the problem of data-efficient controller tuning, adapting both the model and objective simultaneously. The key novelty of the proposed a…

Abstract The COVID-19 crisis has revealed and exacerbated a shortage of mechanical ventilators in hospitals around the world, regardless of their government’s resources. Where some countries can respond to the situation by ordering more high-end ventilators, the price is often too high for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and securing them can be difficult. The goal of this work is to design, prototype, and test a low-cost ventilator, called ETH breathe, based on the automated compression of a resuscitator…

This paper considers the control design for a low-cost ventilator that is based on a manual resuscitator bag (also known as AmbuBag) to pump air into the lungs of a patient who is physically unable to breathe. First, it experimentally shows that for accurately tracking tidal volumes, the controller needs to be adapted to the individual patient and the different configurations, e.g., hardware or operation modes. Second, it proposes a set-point adaptation algorithm that uses sensor measurements of a flow meter to au…