EECI 2020: Course Introduction

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This lecture provides an introduction to specification, design and verification of autonomous systems, with a focus on self-driving cars. Multi-layer, networked control systems are a common architecture for control of cyberphysical systems, where a combination of physics-based dynamical behavior is combined with software-enabled functionality. A key challenge in designing such systems is specification, design and verification of control protocols for decision-making and control in networked control systems. In this lecture, we review the system architecture and design patterns used in development and deployment of autonomous vehicles, along with the challenges in obtaining high performance, robust, and safe operations.

Lecture Materials

• Lecture slides: Introduction to Self-Driving Cars

Further Reading

• Alice: An Information-Rich Autonomous Vehicle for High-Speed Desert Navigation, Cremean et al. Journal of Field Robotics, 2006. This article provides an overview of Alice's architecture and operation.

  • 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge video - desert operation, showing failure due to loss of GPS tracking
  • 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge video - successful run of course 2
  • 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge video - unsuccessful run of course 1 (interference between different controllers)

• Sensing, Navigation and Reasoning Technologies for the DARPA Urban Challenge, DARPA final report, 2007. This is the final report that was submitted to DARPA, documenting the operation of Alice in the 2007 Urban Challenge.

• The RoboFlag Competition, Raffaello D'Andrea and Richard M. Murray. 2003 American Control Conference. This paper gives an overview of the RoboFlag competition and some of the research challenges that it motivates.

• Recent research in cooperative control of multivehicle systems, Richard M Murray. Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement and Control, 129(5):571-583, 2007. This paper provides a formalism for cooperative control problems and surveys research results in the context of that formalism.

Additional Information

• Specification, Design and Verification of Distributed Embedded Systems (MURI project)
• Cyber-Physical Systems - Are Computing Foundations Adequate?, Edward Lee. Position Paper for NSF Workshop On Cyber-Physical Systems: Research Motivation, Techniques and Roadmap, October 16-17, 2006.