Dynamics-aware energy optimal guidance and control of automated ground vehicles

Abstract:  Automated ground vehicles are touted for their potential safety and energy efficiency benefits in both on-road and off-road applications, especially when endowed with V2X connectivity. However, several technical challenges remain for their reliable and widespread deployment. This seminar covers vehicle guidance and control approaches that contribute to this effort. Specifically, we first highlight a distributed predictive control framework that features a two-dimensional maneuver planner incorporating explicit coordination constraints between connected vehicles operating in mixed highway traffic. We show the energy and traffic efficiency benefits at various levels of penetrations of connectivity. Then, we consider an off-road application where we propose predictive control approaches that imbed vehicle dynamics and terra-mechanics models as well as available topological and terrain trafficability information with the objective of minimizing energy consumption by the vehicle while navigating to a goal. In this case, we highlight the computational challenges of these approaches for real-time implementation and offer some avenues for improving computability via hierarchical decompositions that include tracking formulations and offline learnt optimal cost-to-go policies.

Bio:  Dr. Beshah Ayalew is a Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Automotive Engineering at the Clemson University. He received his MS (2000) and Ph.D. (2005) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University. His interest and expertise are in controls and dynamical systems with applications in vehicular dynamics and energy systems. Dr. Ayalew has received the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award from the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) International (2014), the Clemson University Board of Trustees Award for Faculty Excellence (2012, 2019), and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award (2011). He was also a recipient of the Penn State Alumni Association Dissertation Award (2005). He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a Fellow of ASME, and a member of SAE. Dr. Ayalew has authored/co-authored more than 150 refereed publications. He currently serves as an associate editor for IEEE’s Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

Additional Information:

For Zoom information and password, please contact Lisa Spicer - lms8@psu.edu