The seminar is free to attend but registration is required – please email the organizers to receive an invitation

Speaker: Silvia Ferrari

John Brancaccio Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls (LISC) Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Abstract:

Recent work on information-driven sensor path planning has shown that the performance of mobile and remote sensors can be significantly improved by planning their motions based on probabilistic sensor models and the geometric characteristics of the sensor field-of-view (FOV). This talk discusses a general framework by which the expected information gain of future sensor measurements, positions, and orientations can be described by information-theoretic functions in closed form, and, then, used to derive motion planning and control laws for active sensing and information gathering. Recent applications, such as underwater target detection and classification by active sonar and active scene perception by mobile cameras, have shown that the approach can greatly improve upon the quality of the sensor data, while decreasing the resources required, including time, computation, and energy consumption. This talk will present information-driven planning for space situational awareness (SSA), whereby information-driven sensor planning strategies are derived using finite set statistics (FISST). In this case, information-driven sensor planning seeks to optimize the information gain associated with tracking many moving targets by means of many space-based sensors. In addition to developing new FISST information gain functions, this talk will show how distributed optimal control (DOC) can be used to control large numbers of collaborative agents by providing solutions that scale up to hundreds of satellite-based sensors.

Bio
Silvia Ferrari is John Brancaccio Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to that, she was Professor of Engineering and Computer Science at Duke University, and Founder and Director of the NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) and Fellowship program on Wireless Intelligent Sensor Networks (WISeNet). Currently, she is the Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls (LISC) at Cornell University, and her principal research interests include active perception, robust adaptive control, learning and approximate dynamic programming, and control of multiscale dynamical systems. She is the author of the book “Information-driven Path Planning and Control,” MIT Press (2020), and of the TED talk “Do robots dreams of electric sheep?”. She received the B.S. degree from Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. She is a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of ASME, SPIE, and AIAA. She is the recipient of the ONR young investigator award (2004), the NSF CAREER award (2005), and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award (2006).