Automation & Control

Automation & Control combines engineering with machine-learning in order to provide industrial systems with the information necessary to work in an automatic and controlled manner. Research areas include: atomic force microscopy, bio-inspired control, discrete-event systems, formal languages for robot mission specification, hybrid systems, image-guided surgery, networked control systems, robot path planning and control, robotic swarms, and UAV flight control.

NEXTCAR Self-driving Car in Action Advances the Future Internet of Cars

Traffic congestion around the world is worsening, according to transport data firm INRIX. In the U.S. alone, Americans wasted an average of 97 hours in traffic in 2018 – that’s two precious weekends worth of time. Captivity in traffic also costs them nearly $87 billion in 2018, an average of $1,348 per driver. Clearly, the […]

Neuro-Autonomy: Neuroscience-inspired Perception, Navigation, and Spatial Awareness for Autonomous Robots

State-of-the-art Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are trained for specific, well-structured environments and, in general, would fail to operate in unstructured or novel settings. This project aims at developing next-generation AVs, capable of learning and on-the-fly adaptation to environmental novelty. These systems need to be orders of magnitude more energy efficient than current systems and able to pursue complex goals in […]

Decentralized Optimal Control of Cooperating Networked Multi-agent Systems

Multi-agent systems encompass a broad spectrum of applications, ranging from connected autonomous vehicles and the emerging internet of cars, where the spatial domain may be hundreds of miles with time horizons over hours of days, to micro-air vehicles which operate over meter length and minute time scales, and down to nano-manipulation with nanometer spatial microsecond […]

Highway US-33 – Honda and Cassandras Team Up

Self-driving smart cars used to be something that was seen in the movies; an idea that was too far away to even consider a possible reality. Yet, today we are closer to realizing this dream than ever. Most smart cars on the market come equipped with detectors to alert the driver another vehicle is in […]

Achieving Consensus Among Autonomous Dynamic Agents using Control Laws that Maintain Performance as Network Size Increases

Recent advances in automation and robotics have created a pressing need for new “protocols,” that is, for algorithms or control laws that allow teams of multiple autonomous agents to cooperate and accomplish complex tasks. Unfortunately, many of the best protocols for multi-agent coordination problems suffer from scalability issues, that is, while they perform well when […]

Compressive Robotic Systems: Gaining Efficiency Through Sparsity in Dynamic Environments

This project investigates autonomous control and coordination of a group of robots that are tasked to explore, map, or monitor the environment they are in. The project aims to enhance the capabilities of such a group of robots by integrating Compressive Sensing for data compression. Compressive sensing enables robots to quickly extract information from their […]

CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: A Cyber-Physical Infrastructure for the “Smart City”

The project aims at making cities “smarter” by engineering processes such as traffic control, efficient parking services, and new urban activities such as recharging electric vehicles. To that end, the research will study the components needed to establish a Cyber-Physical Infrastructure for urban environments and address fundamental problems that involve data collection, resource allocation, real-time […]

CPS: Synergy: Data Driven Intelligent Controlled Sensing for Cyber Physical Systems

The goal of this project is to develop the foundations of a control and optimization science base for sensor networks viewed as complex systems operating in an uncertain and potentially adverse environment. The approach taken is a combination of addressing fundamental research issues while maintaining a focus on a specific target application domain, a manufacturing […]