Where Is My RoboTaxi?

Abstract

Deployment of autonomous vehicles (AV) on public roads promises increases in efficiency and safety, and requires intelligent situation awareness. We wish to have autonomous vehicles that can learn to behave in safe and predictable ways, and are capable of evaluating risk, understanding the intent of human drivers, and adapting to different road situations. This talk describes the current opportunities and challenges in autonomy. I will highlight new advances in integrating risk and behavior analysis in the control of autonomous vehicles. I will introduce Social Value Orientation (SVO), which captures how an agent’s social preferences and cooperation affect interactions with other agents by quantifying the degree of selfishness or altruism. SVO can be integrated in control and decision making for AVs. I will provide recent examples of self-driving vehicles capable of adaptation and highlight future opportunities for the science and engineering of autonomy.

Biography

Daniela Rus is the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Rus’s research interests are in robotics, mobile computing, and data science. Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy for Arts and Science. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University.