During the last decades, motion planning for autonomous systems has become an important area of research. The high interest is not the least due to the development of systems such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles and robotic manipulators. The objective in optimal motion planning problems is to find feasible motion plans that also optimize a performance measure. From a control perspective, the problem is an instance of an optimal control problem. This thesis addresses optimal motion planning problems for complex dynamical systems that operate in unstructured environments, where no prior reference such as road-lane information is available. Some example scenarios are autonomous docking of vessels in harbors and autonomous parking of self-driving tractor-trailer vehicles at loading sites. The focus is to develop optimal motion planning algorithms that can reliably be applied to these types of problems. This is achieved by combining recent ideas from automatic control, numerical optimization and robotics.

The first contribution is a systematic approach for computing local solutions to motion planning problems in challenging unstructured environments. The solutions are computed by combining homotopy methods and direct optimal control techniques. The general principle is to define a homotopy that transforms, or preferably relaxes, the original problem to an easily solved problem. The approach is demonstrated in motion planning problems in 2D and 3D environments, where the presented method outperforms a state-of-the-art asymptotically optimal motion planner based on random sampling.

The second contribution is an optimization-based framework for automatic generation of motion primitives for lattice-based motion planners. Given a family of systems, the user only needs to specify which principle types of motions that are relevant for the considered system family. Based on the selected principle motions and a selected system instance, the framework computes a library of motion primitives by simultaneously optimizing the motions and the terminal states.

The final contribution of this thesis is a motion planning framework that combines the strengths of sampling-based planners with direct optimal control in a novel way. The sampling-based planner is applied to the problem in a first step using a discretized search space, where the system dynamics and objective function are chosen to coincide with those used in a second step based on optimal control. This combination ensures that the sampling-based motion planner provides a feasible motion plan which is highly suitable as warm-start to the optimal control step. Furthermore, the second step is modified such that it also can be applied in a receding-horizon fashion, where the proposed combination of methods is used to provide theoretical guarantees in terms of recursive feasibility, worst-case objective function value and convergence to the terminal state. The proposed motion planning framework is successfully applied to several problems in challenging unstructured environments for tractor-trailer vehicles. The framework is also applied and tailored for maritime navigation for vessels in archipelagos and harbors, where it is able to compute energy-efficient trajectories which complies with the international regulations for preventing collisions at sea.

New transport technologies have the potential to create more efficient modes of transport and transforming cities for the better by improving urban productivity and increasing efficiency of its transport system to move consumers, labor, and freight. Traffic accidents, energy consumption, pollution, congestion, and long commuting times are main concerns and new transport technologies with autonomous vehicles have the potential to be part of the solution to these important challenges. 

An autonomous, or highly automated car is a vehicle that can operate with little to no human assistance. This technology is not yet generally available, but if fully realized have the potential to fundamentally change the transportation system. The passenger experience will fundamentally change, but there are also possibilities to increase traffic flow, form platoons of transport vehicles to reduce air-drag and thereby energy consumption, and a main challenge is to realize all this in a safe way in uncertain and complex traffic situations on highways and in urban scenarios. 

The key topic of this dissertation is how optimal control techniques, more specifically Model Predictive Control (MPC), can be applied in autonomous driving in dynamic environments and with dynamic constraints on vehicle behavior. The main problem studied is how to control multiple vehicles in an optimal, safe, and collision free way in complex traffic scenarios, e.g., laneswitching, merging, or intersection situations in the presence of moving obstacles, i.e., other vehicles whose behavior and intent may not be known. Further, the controller needs to take maneuvering capabilities of the vehicle into account, respecting road boundaries, speed limitations, and other traffic rules. Optimization-based techniques for control are interesting candidates for multi-vehicle problems, respecting well-defined rules in traffic while still providing a high degree of decision autonomy to each vehicle. 

To ensure autonomy, it is studied how to decentralize the control approach to not rely on a centralized computational resource. Different methods and approaches are proposed in the thesis with guaranteed convergence and collision-avoidance features. To reduce the computational complexity of the controller, a Gaussian risk model for collision prediction is integrated and also a technique that combines MPC with learning methods is explored. 

Main contributions of this dissertation are control methods for autonomous vehicles that provide safety and comfort of passengers even in uncertain traffic situations where the behavior of surrounding vehicles is uncertain, and the methods are computationally fast enough to be used in real time. An important property is that the proposed algorithms are general enough to be used in different traffic scenarios, hence reducing the need for specific solutions for specific situations. 

The fifth generation of mobile communication systems (5G) is nowadays a reality. 5G networks are been deployed all over the world, and the first 5G-capable devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, wearable, etc.) are already commercially available. 5G systems provide unprecedented levels of connectivity and quality of service (QoS) to cope with the incessant growth in the number of connected devices and the huge increase in data-rate demand.

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) technology plays a key role in 5G systems. The underlying principle of this technology is the use of a large number of co-located antennas at the base station, which coherently transmit/receive signals to/from multiple users. This signal co-processing at multiple antennas leads to manifold benefits: array gain, spatial diversity and spatial user multiplexing. These elements enable to meet the QoS requirements established for the 5G systems. The major bottleneck of massive MIMO systems as well as of any cellular network is the inter-cell interference, which affects significantly the cell-edge users, whose performance is already degraded by the path attenuation. To overcome these limitations and provide uniformly excellent service to all the users we need a more radical approach: we need to challenge the cellular paradigm.

In this regard, cell-free massive MIMO constitutes the paradigm shift. In the cell-free paradigm, it is not the base station surrounded by the users, but rather it is each user being surrounded by smaller, simpler, serving base stations referred to as access points (APs). In such a system, each user experiences being in the cell-center, and it does not experience any cell boundaries. Hence, the terminology cell-free. As a result, users are not affected by inter-cell interference, and the path attenuation is significantly reduced due to the presence of many APs in their proximity. This leads to impressive performance.

Although appealing from the performance viewpoint, the designing and implementation of such a distributed massive MIMO system is a challenging task, and it is the object of this thesis. More specifically, in this thesis we study:

Paper A) The large potential of this promising technology in realistic indoor/outdoor scenarios while also addressing practical deployment issues, such as clock synchronization among APs, and cost-efficient implementations. We provide an extensive description of a cell-free massive MIMO system, emphasizing strengths and weaknesses, and pointing out differences and similarities with existing distributed multiple antenna systems, such as Coordinated MultiPoint (CoMP).

Paper B) How to preserve the scalability of the system, by proposing a solution related to data processing, network topology and power control. We consider a realistic scenario where multiple central processing units serve disjoint subsets of APs, and compare the spectral efficiency provided by the proposed scalable framework with the canonical cell-free massive MIMO and CoMP.

Paper C) How to improve the spectral efficiency (SE) in the downlink (DL), by devising two distributed precoding schemes, referred to as local partial zero-forcing (ZF) and local protective partial ZF, that provide an adaptable trade-off between interference cancelation and boosting of the desired signal, with no additional front-haul overhead, and that are implementable by APs with very few antennas. We derive closed-form expressions for the achievable SE under the assumption of independent Rayleigh fading channel, channel estimation error and pilot contamination. These closed-form expressions are then used to devise optimal max-min fairness power control.

Paper D) How to further improve the SE by letting the user estimate the DL channel from DL pilots, instead of relying solely on the knowledge of the channel statistics. We derive an approximate closed-form expression of the DL SE for conjugate beamforming (CB), and assuming independent Rayleigh fading. This expression accounts for beamformed DL pilots, estimation errors and pilot contamination at both the AP and the user side. We devise a sequential convex approximation algorithm to globally solve the max-min fairness power control optimization problem, and a greedy algorithm for uplink (UL) and DL pilot assignment. The latter consists in jointly selecting the UL and DL pilot pair, for each user, that maximizes the smallest SE in the network.

Paper E) A precoding scheme that is more suitable when only the channel statistics are available at the users, referred to as enhanced normalized CB. It consists in normalizing the precoding vector by its squared norm in order to reduce the fluctuations of the effective channel seen at the user, and thereby to boost the channel hardening. The performance achieved by this scheme is compared with the CB scheme with DL training (described in Paper D).

Paper F) A maximum-likelihood-based method to estimate the channel statistics in the UL, along with an accompanying pilot transmission scheme, that is particularly useful in line-of-sight operation and in scenarios with resource constraints. Pilots are structurally phase-rotated over different coherence blocks to create an effective statistical distribution of the received pilot signal that can be efficiently exploited by the AP when performing the proposed estimation method.

The overall conclusion is that cell-free massive MIMO is not a utopia, and a practical, distributed, scalable, high-performance system can be implemented. Today it represents a hot research topic, but tomorrow it might represent a key enabler for beyond-5G technology, as massive MIMO has been for 5G.

During the last decades, improved sensor and hardware technologies as well as new methods and algorithms have made self-driving vehicles a realistic possibility in the near future. At the same time, there has been a growing demand within the transportation sector to increase efficiency and to reduce the environmental impact related to transportation of people and goods. Therefore, many leading automotive and technology companies have turned their attention towards developing advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles.

Autonomous vehicles are expected to have their first big impact in closed environments, such as mines, harbors, loading and offloading sites. In such areas, the legal requirements are less restrictive and the surrounding environment is more controlled and predictable compared to urban areas. Expected positive outcomes include increased productivity and safety, reduced emissions and the possibility to relieve the human from performing complex or dangerous tasks. Within these sites, tractor-trailer vehicles are frequently used for transportation. These vehicles are composed of several interconnected vehicle segments, and are therefore large, complex and unstable while reversing. This thesis addresses the problem of designing efficient motion planning and feedback control techniques for such systems.

The contributions of this thesis are within the area of motion planning and feedback control for long tractor-trailer combinations operating at low-speeds in closed and unstructured environments. It includes development of motion planning and feedback control frameworks, structured design tools for guaranteeing closed-loop stability and experimental validation of the proposed solutions through simulations, lab and field experiments. Even though the primary application in this work is tractor-trailer vehicles, many of the proposed approaches can with some adjustments also be used for other systems, such as drones and ships.

The developed sampling-based motion planning algorithms are based upon the probabilistic closed-loop rapidly exploring random tree (CL-RRT) algorithm and the deterministic lattice-based motion planning algorithm. It is also proposed to use numerical optimal control offline for precomputing libraries of optimized maneuvers as well as during online planning in the form of a warm-started optimization step.

To follow the motion plan, several predictive path-following control approaches are proposed with different computational complexity and performance. Common for these approaches are that they use a path-following error model of the vehicle for future predictions and are tailored to operate in series with a motion planner that computes feasible paths. The design strategies for the path-following approaches include linear quadratic (LQ) control and several advanced model predictive control (MPC) techniques to account for physical and sensing limitations. To strengthen the practical value of the developed techniques, several of the proposed approaches have been implemented and successfully demonstrated in field experiments on a full-scale test platform. To estimate the vehicle states needed for control, a novel nonlinear observer is evaluated on the full-scale test vehicle. It is designed to only utilize information from sensors that are mounted on the tractor, making the system independent of any sensor mounted on the trailer.

The amount of goods produced and transported around the world each year increases and heavy-duty trucks are an important link in the logistic chain. To guarantee reliable delivery a high degree of availability is required, i.e., avoid standing by the road unable to continue the transport mission. Unplanned stops by the road do not only cost due to the delay in delivery, but can also lead to damaged cargo. Vehicle downtime can be reduced by replacing components based on statistics of previous failures. However, such an approach is both expensive due to the required frequent visits to a workshop and inefficient as many components from the vehicles in the fleet are still operational. A prognostic method, allowing for vehicle individualized maintenance plans, therefore poses a significant potential in the automotive field. The prognostic method estimates component degradation and remaining useful life based on recorded data and how the vehicle has been operated.

Lead-acid batteries is a part of the electrical power system in a heavy-duty truck, primarily responsible for powering the starter motor but also powering auxiliary units, e.g., cabin heating and kitchen equipment, which makes the battery a vital component for vehicle availability. Developing physical models of battery degradation is a difficult process which requires access to battery health sensing that is not available in the given study as well a detailed knowledge of battery chemistry.

An alternative approach, considered in this work, is data-driven methods based on large amounts of logged data describing vehicle operation conditions. In the use-case studied, recorded data is not closely related to battery health which makes battery prognostic challenging. Data is collected during infrequent and non-equidistant visits to a workshop and there are complex dependencies between variables in the data. The main aim of this work has been to develop a framework and methods for estimating lifetime of lead-acid batteries using data-driven methods for condition-based maintenance. The methodology is general and can be applicable for prognostics of other components.

A main contribution of the thesis is development of machine learning models for predictive maintenance, estimating conditional reliability functions, using Random Survival Forests (RSF) and recurrent neural networks (RNN). An important property of the data is that for a specific vehicle there may be multiple data readouts, but also one single data readout which makes predictive modeling challenging and dealing with this situation is discussed for both RSF and neural networks models. Data quality is important when building data-driven models, and here the data is imbalanced since there are few battery failures relative to the number of vehicles. Further, the data includes many uninformative variables and among those that are informative, there are complex dependencies and correlation. Methods for selecting which data features to use in the model in this situation is also a key contribution. When a point estimation of the conditional reliability functions is available, it is of interest to know how uncertain the estimate is as it allows to take quality of the prediction into account when deciding on maintenance actions. A theory for estimating the variance of the RSF predictor is another contribution in the thesis. To conclude, the results show that Long Short-Term Memory networks, which is a type of RNN, is the most suitable for the vehicle operational data and give the best performance among methods evaluated in the thesis.