Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar

*Connection details for this online presentation will be posted when available.

A single design defect can wreak havoc across thousands of deployed instances of autonomous systems or cyber-physical systems (CPS) such as self-driving cars and drones. Rigorous approaches based on controller synthesis can generate correct-by-construction controllers that guarantee that the system under control meets some higher-level tasks. By reducing designing and testing cycles, synthesis can help create safe autonomous systems that involve complex interactions of dynamics and decision logic. In general, however, synthesis problems are known to have high computational complexity for high dimensional and nonlinear systems. In this talk, I will present new synthesis algorithms that suggest that these challenges can be overcome and that rigorous approaches are indeed promising. Our synthesized controllers consist of a reference trajectory and a tracking controller which drives the system's state towards the reference. The key idea of our approach relies on symbolic sensitivity analysis to decouple the synthesis of reference and tracking controllers. Our overall algorithms guarantee that the resulting controller can make sure every trajectory from the initial set of the system satisfies the given reach-avoid requirement. Finally, I will discuss successful applications in autonomous driving scenarios to show the power of these methods for solving challenging problems.