“Autonomy and the Future of Urban Mobility”

Abstract: 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 motion-planning, 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 several cities worldwide, we discuss the potential impact of autonomous shared cars on urban mobility. In particular, we estimate that the technology could potentially enable a 60% reduction in the number of passenger vehicles in a city like Singapore, combining the convenience of private vehicles with the sustainability of public transportation.

Biosketch: Emilio Frazzoli is a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems  at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is currently the CTO of nuTonomy Inc, a startup developing autonomous mobility-on-demand systems, which he co-founded with Karl Iagnemma in 2013. 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 was the recipient of a NSF CAREER award in 2002, and the IEEE George S. Axelby Award in 2015. Dr. Frazzoli’s current research interests focus primarily on autonomous vehicles, mobile robotics, and transportation systems.