Fair and Secure Control for Autonomous Systems

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Event Speaker
Houssam Abbas
Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Oregon State University
Event Type
Tech Talk
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Event Description

This talk will survey the state-of-the-art in formal methods for the control of dynamical systems, and present our recent work in fair control for fleets of autonomous robots. Self-driving cars, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and other safety-critical autonomous robots require a high level of confidence in their correctness, beyond what most development methods provide today. Formal methods develop mathematically rigorous yet practical guarantees of system correctness. We introduce the notion of fair control in complex missions, and guarantee that motion paths for large UAV fleets are fairly planned and not dominated by any one operator, which is essential for the transparency and success of urban UAV applications. We demonstrate that flying fair trajectories is in fact more efficient and consumes less energy than existing methods.

Speaker Biography

Houssam Abbas is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. His research interests are in the verification, control and testing of autonomous systems, with particular emphasis on unmanned ground and aerial vehicles, cyber-physical security of dynamical systems, and formal theories of autonomous systems ethics. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and a design automation engineer at Intel. Houssam holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University.

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