Seminar: Autonomous vehicles: Path planning and control, Prof. Luca Bascetta, Politecnico di Milano

Abstract:
The popularity of the research on wheeled mobile robots has been recently increasing, due to their possible use in different outdoor environments. Planetary explorations, search and rescue missions in hazardous areas, surveillance, humanitarian de-mining, drive-less mobility, as well as agriculture works  represent possible applications for autonomous vehicles in natural and urban environments. Differently from the case of indoor mobile robotics, where only flat terrains are considered, outdoor robotics deals with all possible natural terrains. The unstructured environment, terrain roughness and poorly traversable terrains, that characterize a natural environment, or the dynamic obstacles and safety issues, that characterize an urban scenario, make the development of an autonomous vehicle a challenging problem.

Among the huge number of functionalities that are required to develop an autonomous vehicle, path planning, and trajectory tracking are particularly relevant. On one side the planner has the responsibility to compute a trajectory that takes the vehicle to a desired location, being also “feasible”, i.e., compatible with the vehicle kino-dynamic constraints, and “safe”. On the other side the behaviour of the vehicle is directly related to the trajectory tracking controller and to the interaction between this system and the localization module.

This talk focuses on sampling-based planning and MPC-based control approaches that allow to address  planning and trajectory tracking taking into account vehicle kino-dynamics and actuation constraints, modularity and real-time implementability of the navigation system, ease of tuning, while guaranteeing important theoretical properties

Brief Bio:

Luca Bascetta received the "Laurea" degree cum laude in Computer Science Engineering in 1999 and the Doctorate degree in Information Technology in 2004 both from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. From 2006 to 2014 he has been an Assistant Professor in Automatic Control at the School of Industrial Engineering of Politecnico di Milano. From 2015 he has been Associate Professor in Automatic Control at the School of Industrial and Information Engineering of Politecnico di Milano. Prof. Bascetta currently teaches Automatic Control to Aerospace Engineering students and Control of mobile robots to Automation Engineering students at Politecnico di Milano. His research interests and research projects are in the fields of modelling, planning and control of industrial and mobile robots, and  autonomous vehicles. He was the person in charge for Politecnico di Milano in the FP7 four years long European Integrating Project ECHORD as coordinator of the experiment FIDELIO FIxtureless DEburring of wheeLs by human demonstratIOn, and in the European Integrating Project ECHORD++ as coordinator of the experiment GRAPE Ground Robot for vineyArd monitoring and ProtEction.
Prof. Bascetta is a senior member of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.