Coping with
Uncertainty in Cooperative Control for Autonomous Vehicles
Professor
Kevin Passino
Abstract:
Groups of autonomous vehicles that coordinate their actions via inter-vehicle
communications sometimes have the ability to perform tasks more efficiently
than individual vehicles that lack any communication capabilities. The
uncertainty in sensing and taking actions leads to imperfections in the
information on which decisions are made for cooperative or noncooperative vehicles;
however, some additional uncertainty arises due to the desire for
cooperation. First, inter-vehicle
communication imperfections (e.g., network delays) leads to mistakes in
coordinating actions. Second,
vehicular computational constraints limit the feasible types of multi-vehicle
coordination (e.g., coordinated path planning many steps into the future may
not be feasible). In this talk,
cooperative control methods will be introduced that can cope with such
uncertainty and hence achieve benefits over a noncooperative set of
vehicles. Applications to
cooperative control for autonomous air vehicles in military missions will be
used to illustrate system level
design principles and cases where uncertainty rises so high that cooperation is
not beneficial.
Professor Passino is a IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer
3:30 Ð 4:30 p.m.