In this letter, inspired by the needs of the European H2020 Project PANTHEON 1 , we propose a full navigation stack purposely designed for the autonomous navigation of Ackermann steering vehicles in precision farming settings. The proposed stack is composed of a local planner and a pose regulation controller, both implemented in ROS. The local planner generates, in real-time, optimal trajectories described by a sequence of successive poses. The planning problem is formulated as a real-time cost-function minimization problem over a finite time horizon where the Ackermann kinematics and the presence of obstacles are encoded as constraints. The control law ensures the convergence toward each of these poses. To do so, in this paper we propose a novel non-smooth control law designed to ensure the solvability of the pose regulation problem for the Ackermann vehicle. Theoretical characterization of the convergence property of the proposed pose regulation controller is provided. Numerical simulations along with real-world experiments are provided to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed navigation strategy.

This paper is based on the observation that, during Covid-19 epidemic, the choice of which individuals should be tested has an important impact on the effectiveness of selective confinement measures. This decision problem is closely related to the problem of optimal sensor selection, which is a very active research subject in control engineering. The goal of this paper is to propose a policy to smartly select the individuals to be tested. The main idea is to model the epidemics as a stochastic dynamic system and to select the individual to be tested accordingly to some optimality criteria, e.g. to minimize the probability of undetected asymptomatic cases. Every day, the probability of infection of the different individuals is updated making use of the stochastic model of the phenomenon and of the information collected in the previous days. Simulations for a closed community of 10’000 individuals show that the proposed technique, coupled with a selective confinement policy, can reduce the spread of the disease while limiting the number of individuals confined if compared to the simple contact tracing of positive and to an off-line test selection strategy based on the number of contacts.

Formulation of a novel physiologically-based model describing ectotherms.• A system of ordinary differential equations describes the identifiable life stages.• The model can describe the life cycle of most of the insect species.• Four models existing in literature can be obtained as a special case of the novel model.

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