On the quantitative resilience assessment of complex engineered systems

Recent years have seen the increasing complexity of engineered systems. Complexity and uncertainty also exist in engineered systems’ interactions with human operators, managers, and the organization. Resilience, focusing on a system's ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and recover from disruptive situations, can provide an umbrella concept...

Probabilistic Risk Metric for Highway Driving Leveraging Multi-Modal Trajectory Predictions

Road traffic safety has attracted increasing research attention, in particular in the current transition from human-driven vehicles to autonomous vehicles. Surrogate measures of safety are widely used to assess traffic safety but they typically ignore motion uncertainties and are inflexible in dealing with two-dimensional motion. Meanwhile,...

Where to Look Next: Learning Viewpoint Recommendations for Informative Trajectory Planning

Search missions require motion planning and navigation methods for information gathering that continuously replan based on new observations of the robot's surroundings. Current methods for information gathering, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search, are capable of reasoning over long horizons, but they are computationally expensive. An alternative...

Scenario-Based Trajectory Optimization in Uncertain Dynamic Environments

We present an optimization-based method to plan the motion of an autonomous robot under the uncertainties associated with dynamic obstacles, such as humans. Our method bounds the marginal risk of collisions at each point in time by incorporating chance constraints into the planning problem. This problem is not suitable for online optimization...

Emerging Risk Management Versus Traditional Risk: Differences and Challenges in the Context of Occupational Health and Safety

As a result of the important and rapid technological advances in industrial processes, in recent years the scientific interest in the field of occupational health and safety (OH&S) is increasing. This scenario of continuous change generates both new opportunities and new challenges in the workplace. This circumstance allows eliminating or...

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...

Safe-by-Design: from Safety to Responsibility

Safe-by-design (SbD) aims at addressing safety issues already during the R&D and design phases of new technologies. SbD has increasingly become popular in the last few years for addressing the risks of emerging technologies like nanotechnology and synthetic biology. We ask to what extent SbD approaches can deal with uncertainty, in...