ICON Seminar in Autonomy: Prof. Rahul Mangharam (UPenn)

Time: 3:00-4:00 pm Eastern Time, March 29 (Friday), 2024

Location: HAMP 1252

Zoom Link: https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/98798335169?pwd=ZFNMdmZXendoQ1RCRDczM2dTR1RIdz09

Free coffee and snacks will be provided.

MAD Games - Multi-Agent Dynamic Games:

What Can You Learn from Autonomous Racing?

ABSTRACT

Balancing performance and safety is crucial to deploying autonomous vehicles in multi-agent environments. In particular, autonomous racing is a domain that penalizes safe but conservative policies, highlighting the need for robust, adaptive strategies. Current approaches either make simplifying assumptions about other agents or lack robust mechanisms for online adaptation. In this talk, we will explore research themes on perception, planning, and control at the limits of performance. We explore:

(1) How to generate the most competitive agents who dynamically balance safety and assertiveness by using distributionally robust online adaptation and Game-theoretic planning.

(2) How to be better-than-the-best using imitation learning with multiple imperfect experts.

(3) Using invertible neural networks to solve inverse problems in localization and SLAM.

(4) How to build the most efficient autonomous racecar with Multi-domain optimization across vehicle design, planning, and control.

We realize all our research in the https://f1tenth.org autonomous racecar platform that is 10th the size, but 10x the fun! The main takeaway from this talk is how you can get involved in very exciting research on safe autonomous systems.  I will also present projects on AV Gokart that we are doing in the Autoware Center of Excellence for Autonomous Driving.

SPEAKER

Rahul Mangharam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founding member of the PRECISE Center and directs the Safe Autonomous Systems Lab at Penn. His research is at the intersection of formal methods, machine learning, and controls for medical devices, energy-efficient buildings, & autonomous systems. He is the Penn Director for Safety21 US DoT National University Transportation Center ($20MM), Director of the Autoware Center of Excellence in Autonomous Driving, Board Member of The Autoware Foundation, and Leader of the F1Tenth Autonomous Racing Community.      

Dr. Mangharam received the 2016 US Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE), the 2014 IEEE Benjamin Franklin Key Award, 2013 NSF CAREER Award, 2012 Intel Early Faculty Career Award and was selected by the National Academy of Engineering for the 2012 and 2018 US Frontiers of Engineering. Dr. Mangharam received his Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University where he also received his MS and BS.

Recording:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B54zXqY8Zoc&ab_channel=ICONPurdue

Organizers: Ziran Wang (ziran@purdue.edu), Nak-seung Patrick Hyun (nhyun@purdue.edu), & Tho Le (thovle@purdue.edu)