Social Trajectory Planning for Urban Autonomous Surface Vessels

In this article, we propose a trajectory planning algorithm that enables autonomous surface vessels to perform socially compliant navigation in a city's canal. The key idea behind the proposed algorithm is to adopt an optimal control formulation in which the deviation of movements of the autonomous vessel from nominal movements of human...

Multi-robot Task Assignment for Aerial Tracking with Viewpoint Constraints

We address the problem of assigning a team of drones to autonomously capture a set desired shots of a dynamic target in the presence of obstacles. We present a two-stage planning pipeline that generates offline an assignment of drone to shots and locally optimizes online the viewpoint. Given desired shot parameters, the high-level planner uses a...

Trajectory Optimization and Situational Analysis Framework for Autonomous Overtaking with Visibility Maximization

In this paper we present a trajectory generation method for autonomous overtaking of unexpected obstacles in a dynamic urban environment. In these settings, blind spots can arise from perception limitations. For example when overtaking unexpected objects on the vehicle's ego lane on a two-way street. In this case, a human driver would first make...

Optimizing vehicle distributions and fleet sizes for shared mobility-on-demand

Mobility-on-demand (MoD) systems are revolutionizing urban transit with the introduction of ride-sharing. Such systems have the potential to reduce vehicle congestion and improve accessibility of a city's transportation infrastructure. Recently developed algorithms can compute routes for vehicles in real-time for a city-scale volume of...

Optimizing multi-class fleet compositions for shared Mobility-as-a-Service

Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) systems are transforming the way society moves. The introduction and adoption of pooled ride-sharing has revolutionized urban transit with the potential of reducing vehicle congestion, improving accessibility and flexibility of a city's transportation infrastructure. Recently developed algorithms can compute...

Social behavior for autonomous vehicles

Deployment of autonomous vehicles on public roads promises increased efficiency and safety. It requires understanding the intent of human drivers and adapting to their driving styles. Autonomous vehicles must also behave in safe and predictable ways without requiring explicit communication. We integrate tools from social psychology into...

Planning and decision-making for autonomous vehicles

In this review, we provide an overview of emerging trends and challenges in the field of intelligent and autonomous, or self-driving, vehicles. Recent advances in the field of perception, planning, and decision-making for autonomous vehicles have led to great improvements in functional capabilities, with several prototypes already driving on our...

Joint multi-policy behavior estimation and receding-horizon trajectory planning for automated urban driving

When driving in urban environments, an autonomous vehicle must account for the interaction with other traffic participants. It must reason about their future behavior, how its actions affect their future behavior, and potentially<br/>consider multiple motion hypothesis. In this paper we introduce a method for joint behavior estimation and...

Vehicle rebalancing for Mobility-on-Demand systems with ride-sharing

Recent developments in Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) systems have demonstrated the potential of road vehicles as an efficient mode of urban transportation Newly developed algorithms can compute vehicle routes in real-time for batches of requests and allow for multiple requests to share vehicles. These algorithms have primarily focused on optimally...

Distributed multi-robot formation control in dynamic environments

This paper presents a distributed method for formation control of a homogeneous team of aerial or ground mobile robots navigating in environments with static and dynamic obstacles. Each robot in the team has a finite communication and visibility radius and shares information with its neighbors to coordinate. Our approach leverages both...

Compositional and contract-based verification for autonomous driving on road networks

Recent advances in autonomous driving have raised the problem of safety<br/>to the forefront and incentivized research into establishing safety guarantees. In this paper, we propose a safety verification framework as a safety standard for driving controllers with full or shared autonomy based on compositional and contract-based principles. Our...

Multi-robot formation control and object transport in dynamic environments via constrained optimization

We present a constrained optimization method for multi-robot formation control in dynamic environments, where the robots adjust the parameters of the formation, such as size and three-dimensional orientation, to avoid collisions with static and moving obstacles, and to make progress towards their goal. We describe two variants of the...

Reactive mission and motion planning with deadlock resolution avoiding dynamic obstacles

In the near future mobile robots, such as personal robots or mobile manipulators, will share the workspace with other robots and humans. We present a method for mission and motion planning that applies to small teams of robots performing a task in an environment with moving obstacles, such as humans. Given a mission specification written in...

Safe nonlinear trajectory generation for parallel autonomy with a dynamic vehicle model

High-end vehicles are already equipped with safety systems, such as assistive braking and automatic lane following, enhancing vehicle safety. Yet, these current solutions can only help in low-complexity driving situations. In this paper, we introduce a parallel autonomy, or shared control, framework that computes safe trajectories for an...

Parallel autonomy in automated vehicles: Safe motion generation with minimal intervention

Current state-of-the-art vehicle safety systems, such as assistive braking or automatic lane following, are still only able to help in relatively simple driving situations. We introduce a Parallel Autonomy shared-control framework that produces safe trajectories based on human inputs even in much more complex driving scenarios, such as those...

Predictive routing for autonomous mobility-on-demand systems with ride-sharing

Ride-sharing, or carpooling, systems with autonomous vehicles will provide efficient and reliable urban mobility on demand. In this work we present a method for dynamic vehicle routing that leverages historical data to improve the performance of a network of self-driving taxis. In particular, we describe a constrained optimization method...