Special Seminar: Specification-Driven Design for Modular and Safe Robotics
Petter Nilsson
2:30 PM on 2019-02-14
3-180 Keller Hall
Abstract
Robotic systems of tomorrow will be increasingly interconnected and operate amongst us, which implies a two-fold engineering challenge of great complexity and no tolerance for mistakes. In this talk I will argue that formally written specifications should be a core component of system design, and talk about how specifications can promote modularity and resilience in robotic systems.
The first part of the talk will be centered on safety-critical control via invariance: I will show how invariance specifications in the form of assume-guarantee contracts can be leveraged to decompose problems and thus enable modular design, and how certificates for invariance can be used to formally relate low-level dynamics to a high-level abstract roadmap for planning. The second part of the talk will cover specification-guided methods for multi-robot systems, and how problem structure can be leveraged to overcome scalability challenges. Two types of structure will be considered: permutation symmetries in counting problems with applications in multi-robot coordination, and planning in sparsely connected networks of MDPs with applications to cooperative Mars exploration. The talk will be concluded with a few words about current research topics and directions for the future.
Bio
Petter Nilsson received his B.S. in Engineering Physics in 2011, and his M.S. in Optimization and Systems Theory in 2013, both from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2017 from the University of Michigan. In addition to his technical degrees, he holds a B.S. in Business and Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics.
He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology where he conducts research on specification-driven control and autonomy for safety-critical cyber-physical systems, with applications in autonomous driving, space exploration, and multi-agent coordination.