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Department of Mechanical Engineering
Berkeley/Hyundai Distinguished Speaker Seminar Series
presents
“Autonomy and the Future of Urban Mobility”
Prof. Emilio Frazzoli
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Friday, May 15, 2015
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
3110 Etcheverry Hall
Coffee and Cookies will be served
ABSTRACT
Autonomous (or driverless, or self-driving) vehicles are ubiquitous in the news today, hardly a week goes by without some new media
coverage of the technology. This talk will cover some recent advances in the design of autonomous vehicle systems, at different levels of
abstraction, ranging from a single vehicle to a fleet capable of serving the mobility needs of a whole city.
First, I will talk about our recent advances in real-time planning, control, and decision making for autonomous vehicles on public roads,
where they have to comply not only with basic safety constraints (e.g., collision avoidance) but also with rules of the road, in a dynamic
environment shared with other vehicles as well as pedestrians. Our approach leverages and combines ideas from sampling-based motionplanning, random geometric graphs, formal languages, and model checking, and allows the synthesis of control algorithms with provable
guarantees of completeness, correctness, and optimality.
Second, I will discuss the potential impact of such technologies on urban mobility. In particular, I will consider the operation of a fleet of
shared autonomous vehicles, providing mobility-on-demand services to customers in an urban environment. I will discuss analytical
models capturing the dynamic and stochastic features of customer demand, and present system-wide coordination algorithms aimed at
throughput maximization. Based on real data from the city of Singapore, we estimate that autonomous shared cars could potentially
enable a 60% reduction in the number of passenger vehicles in a city, combining the convenience of private vehicles with the
sustainability of public transportation.
BIOGRAPHY
Emilio Frazzoli is a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, and the
Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a Laurea degree in Aerospace Engineering from
the University of Rome, “Sapienza,” Italy, in 1994, and a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. Before returning to MIT in 2006, he held faculty positions at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently the Director of the Transportation@MIT initiative, and
the Lead Principal Investigator of the Future Urban Mobility IRG of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).
He was the recipient of a NSF CAREER award in 2002. He is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics and a Senior Member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Dr. Frazzoli's current research interests focus primarily on autonomous vehicles, mobile robotics, and transportation systems.
Hosted by: Prof. Borrelli, 5132 Etcheverry Hall, 643-3871, fborrelli@me.berkeley.edu