| Title | Autonomy and the Future of Urban Mobility |
| Speaker | Dr. Emilio Frazzoli |
| Chair | Justin Dauwels |
Abstract
This talk presents an overview of current research activities on the role of autonomy, i.e., the ability of vehicles to drive safely and reliably without the need of human intervention or supervision, in future automotive transportation, with a focus on urban mobility. Advocates of autonomy and driver assistance systems often cite as key benefits of such technologies the potential improvements in terms of automotive safety and traffic efficiency, as well as a reduction in environmental impact, e.g., by a dramatic reduction of the impact of human errors, and by the removal of human cognitive and sensory constraints on the achievable traffic throughput. However, autonomy can also enable new models of car operations and ownership. In particular, this talk will discuss the impact of autonomy on Mobility on Demand systems based on one-way vehicle sharing, with vehicles able to reposition themselves in order to match customer demand, presenting an algorithmic approach to fleet sizing and operations. Challenges to the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles, besides regulatory aspects, include affordability and safety/reliability certification. Progress on these two areas, relying, respectively, on integrating minimalistic sensing with prior environment information as well as vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, and on the systematic design of planning and control systems that are probably correct, will also be discussed. These technologies are demonstrated experimentally on a low-cost autonomous testbed for affordable and reliable Mobility on Demand services currently under development by the author and his collaborators, within the Future Urban Mobility project at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology.
Biography
Emilio Frazzoli is currently a Singapore Research Professor and Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is the Lead Principal Investigator of the Future Urban Mobility project with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. He received a Laurea degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Rome, “Sapienza”, Italy, in 1994, and a Ph.D. degree in Navigation and Control Systems from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2001. Between 1994 and 1997 he worked as an officer in the Italian Navy, and as a spacecraft dynamics specialist for the European Space Agency Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, and Telespazio, in Rome, Italy. From 2001 to 2004 he was an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 2004 to 2006 he was an Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was the recipient of a NSF CAREER award in 2002. He is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a Senior Member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, for the AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, and for the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications. Dr. Frazzoli’s main research interests lie in the area of planning and control for autonomous vehicles, mobile robots, and transportation networks.
