Behavior Specifications of Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract:

One of the major challenges in the development, validation and deployment of autonomous vehicles is to understand what constitutes their correct behavior. The behavior specifications of autonomous vehicles come from numerous sources, including not only the vaguely written traffic laws, but also ethics and local driving culture to ensure their predictability and compatibility with other traffic participants. In this talk, I will provide real-life examples where such specifications are conflicting and present a new formalism called “rulebooks”, developed at Nutonomy, to specify the correct behavior of autonomous vehicles and provide a systematic approach to handle possibly conflicting specifications.

Dr.  Tichakorn (Nok) Wongpiromsarn is currently a principal research scientist at nuTonomy. Prior to joining nuTonomy, she  was a postdoctoral associate at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) working on the Future Urban Mobility project under the supervision of Prof. Emilio Frazzoli. She  received the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from California Institute of Technology in 2010. Her advisor was Prof. Richard Murray.  Her research spans several areas of control and computer science, including hybrid systems, distributed control systems, formal methods, situational reasoning, robotics and transportation networks.