Coordination of autonomous vehicles at intersections

22 dicembre 2016
22 December 2016
Contatti: 
DII - Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale
via Sommarive, 9 - 38123 Povo, Trento
Tel. 
+39 0461 282500 - 2503
Fax 
fax +39 0461 281977

Venue: Room “Sala Girasole”, DII, Via Sommarive, 9 Povo (TN) Time: 2:00 Pm-3:00 Pm

The coordination of autonomous vehicles approaching an intersection has recently attracted increasing research interest. The main motivation behind this research topic is to use automation in order to (a) reduce the amount of accidents, (b) reduce pollution and energy consumption and (c) increase the capacity of the infrastructure. In order to achieve these three goals, it is necessary to introduce communication between the involved agents and the infrastructure, and to design a suitable algorithmic framework in order to compute a solution. The coordination problem can be framed as a distributed mixed-integer optimal control problem. While this class of problems has a high complexity and is known to be NP-hard, by designing tailored optimisation algorithms and heuristics one can aim at computing at least approximated solutions in a rather short time. This seminar introduces one of the steps towards such an algorithm: we assume a prescribed crossing order is given and focus on the continuous part of the problem, i.e. the solution of the distributed optimal control problem. Note that the problem we address is not restricted to vehicles approaching an intersection, but can be framed more generally as a resource allocation problem subject to dynamic constraints. Such problems find applications in e.g. production facilities, traffic management, and logistics.

  • Mario Zanon received the B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Trento in 2008 and the M.Sc. in 2010 in Mechatronics and in General Engineering from the University of Trento and the Ecole Centrale Paris respectively in the context of a dual degree agreement. He obtained the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the KU Leuven in 2015 under the supervision of Prof. Moritz Diehl. Currently he is a postdoc researcher at Chalmers University of Technology under the supervision of Prof. Paolo Falcone. His research interests include distributed MPC, economic MPC, optimal control and estimation of nonlinear dynamic systems, in particular for aerospace and automotive applications. mariozanon.wordpress.com

 

 

 

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