Fast, optimal, and guaranteed safe synthesis for autonomous systems
7/04/2022, 10:30am
Speaker
Abstract
Rigorous approaches based on formal synthesis can generate correct-by-construction plans and controllers. 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, nonlinear systems and complex tasks. In this talk, I will present a new synthesis approach that suggests that these challenges can be overcome and that rigorous approaches are indeed promising. I will talk about how to synthesize plans and controllers for autonomous systems that are nonlinear, hybrid, multi-agent, and need to follow temporal logic specifications, with guarantees on the safety and optimality of the solutions.
Speaker Bio
Chuchu Fan an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. Before that, she was a postdoc researcher at Caltech and got her Ph.D. from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University, Department of Automation, in 2013. Her group at MIT works on using rigorous mathematics including formal methods, machine learning, and control theory for the design, analysis, and verification of safe autonomous systems. Chuchu’s dissertation work "Formal methods for safe autonomy” won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2020.