Game-Theoretic, Set-Theoretic and Optimal Control for Safe and Energy-Efficient Mobility

 with Huayi Li, University of Kentucky
Thursday, February 6, 10:00 – 11:00AM
310 Kelly Hall

Advances in mobility technology are expected to bring significant societal impacts, while many challenges remain to be addressed in achieving safe and energy-efficient mobility. This talk introduces several recent advances in control strategies to highlight some solutions. Firstly, for safety-critical applications, it is important to guarantee that the systems can operate without constrain violations even when failures occur. Meanwhile, the system’s availability should be maximized. I will present a set-theoretic and reference governor-centric fault-tolerant control strategy that exploits nesting between sets to satisfy constraints in all phases of failure detection, isolation, and reconfiguration. In the second part of the talk, I will focus on motion planning and control for autonomous driving applications. In the foreseeable future, autonomous vehicles are expected to operate together with human-driven vehicles in traffic. Thus, the cognitive behaviors of human drivers should be considered during the autonomous driving control development. I will present an energy-efficient autonomous driving policy trained by reinforcement learning using a battery electric vehicle powertrain model and a level-k game-theoretic interactive traffic model. To conclude the talk, I will highlight some results of our latest development for a strategy that increases the chance of successful overtaking on two-lane rural highways and guarantees collision-free trajectory tracking using set-theoretic and optimal control methods.

Huayi Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Kentucky (UK). Her research and teaching focus on constrained and optimal control, with special interests in set-theoretic control, game-theoretic control, and AI-enabled control for safe, clean, and energy-efficient mobility systems in the aerospace, automotive, and robotic domains. Huayi Li joined the UK-Paducah Extended Campus Program in 2023 after completing her postdoctoral research at Texas A&M University. She received her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2022 and M.S. in Automotive Engineering from Clemson University in 2015.

 Host: Kevin Kochersberger