Past Event: Center for Autonomy Seminar

Human-centered, probabilistic planning and control

Meeko Oishi, University of New Mexico

Abstract

Although human interaction with autonomous systems is becoming ubiquitous in consumer products, transportation systems, manufacturing, and many other domains, few tools exist for modeling, computation, and control that account for human uncertainty and decision making in autonomous systems.  We focus on methods based in probabilistic verification and control that help ensure compatibility of autonomous systems with human decision making and human uncertainty.  We seek to embed human needs at the design stage, and to design tools that can accommodate human uncertainty.  In this talk, we consider construction of “blameless” controllers that can facilitate operation under infeasible constraints in an ethical manner.  Blameless controllers satisfy a priori ordered priorities amongst constraints, ensuring that more important constraints are prioritized over less important ones.  We also consider data-driven tools for high fidelity modeling and characterization of human-in-the-loop trajectories, that accommodate dynamic processes with probabilistic human inputs. Lastly, we explore computational techniques for probabilistic verification of human-in-the-loop systems through propagation of distributions through ReLU neural nets.  

Biography

Meeko Oishi received the Ph.D. (2004) and M.S. (2000) in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University (Ph.D. minor, Electrical Engineering), and a B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University (1998).  She is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico.  Her research interests include human-in-the-loop control, stochastic optimal control, and autonomous systems.  She previously held a faculty position at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, and postdoctoral positions at Sandia National Laboratories and at the National Ecological Observatory Network.  She was a Visiting Researcher at AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate, and a Science and Technology Policy Fellow at The National Academies.  She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the NSF BRITE Fellowship, the Truman Postdoctoral Fellowship in National Security Science and Engineering, and a member of the 2022-2024 US Defense Science Study Group.