Abstract

Highly autonomous systems, such as autonomous vehicles are expected to exhibit complex behaviors in a changing and often unpredictable environment. As such they require an equally complex reasoning system to provide guidance and control (G&C). The overall decision problem involves continuous dynamics, related to the physical system, and discrete dynamics, related to rules such as traffic rules. Due to such a hybrid nature and to the different time scales involved, the overall problem is too computationally complex to be solved in real-time as a whole in production-grade embedded platforms. In this talk we describe modular architectures that decompose the G&C problem into tractable sequences of sub-problems, while retaining safety properties for the integrated control architecture. These result in G&C architectures for autonomous vehicles that are flexible, expandable, and provably safe and robust, and yet appropriate for the embedded platforms typical of automotive, aerospace, robotics. Several tests on a scaled testbench for autonomous driving system development will be presented to demonstrate the concept.

Bio

Stefano Di Cairano received the Master (Laurea), and the PhD in Information Engineering in ’04 and ’08, respectively, from the University of Siena, Italy. He has been visiting student at the Technical University of Denmark and at the California Institute of Technology. During 2008–2011, he was with Powertrain Control R&A, Ford Research and Adv. Engineering, Dearborn, MI. Since 2011, he is with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Cambridge, MA, where he is now the Senior Team Leader of Control for Autonomy, and a Distinguished Researcher. His research is on optimization-based control strategies for complex mechatronic systems, in automotive, factory automation, transportation systems and aerospace. His research interests include model predictive control, constrained control, particle filtering, hybrid systems, optimization. Dr. Di Cairano is an author in more than 200 peer reviewed papers in journals and conference proceedings and an inventor in more than 50 patents. He was the Chair of the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Automotive Controls, the Chair of IEEE CSS Standing Committee on Standards and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. He is currently the Vice-Chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Optimal Control, an Executive member of the IFAC Committee on Industry, and the Chair of the Technology Conferences Editorial Board.