Location: Engineering Building, Room 101

Speaker: Dr. Tamas Molnar

Abstract:
Control and automation have reached the point where robotic systems and automated vehicles enter our everyday lives. In order to deploy these systems in the real world, however, strict requirements of safe operation must be met. Guaranteeing safe behavior on these systems may often be challenging, since they exhibit complicated, high-dimensional dynamics. Thus, the goal of this talk is to discuss how nonlinear control theory can be utilized to achieve provably safe behavior on real-world control systems like robotic systems and vehicles.

In this talk, I establish a control framework that endows real-world systems with formal safety guarantees when these systems are controlled based on simplified dynamical models. I address robustness to the discrepancies between the systems and their models, including disturbances and time delays. I implement this control framework on a wide variety of systems, such as legged, wheeled and flying robots, manipulators, aerial and ground vehicles, in both simulation and experiments. This work demonstrates the potential of nonlinear control theory to provide guaranteed safe behavior in real-world applications, that ultimately facilitates the widespread deployment of safe autonomous systems.

Biography:
Tamas Molnar is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. Earlier, he held a postdoctoral position at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, between 2018 and 2020. He received PhD and MSc degrees in Mechanical Engineering and his BSc degree in Mechatronics Engineering in 2018, 2015 and 2013, respectively from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary. His research interests include nonlinear dynamics and control, safety-critical control, and time delay systems with applications to connected automated vehicles and robotic systems.