ME Faculty Seminar Series: Ram Vasudevan

Associate Professor

U-M Mechanical Engineering and the Robotics Institute

Autonomous systems offer the promise of providing greater safety and access. However, this positive impact will only be achieved if the underlying algorithms that control such systems can be certified to behave robustly. This talk describes a technique called Reachability-based Trajectory Design, which constructs a parameterized representation of the forward reachable set that it then uses in concert with predictions to enable real-time, certified, collision checking. This approach, which is guaranteed to generate not-at-fault behavior, is demonstrated across a variety of different real-world platforms including ground vehicles, manipulators, and walking robots.

Ram Vasudevan is an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering and the Robotics Institute at the University of Michigan. He received a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, an MS degree in Electrical Engineering, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering all from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the ONR Young Investigator Award, and the 1938E Award from the University of Michigan. His work has received best paper awards at the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, the ASME Dynamics Systems and Controls Conference, and IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, and has been finalist for best paper at Robotics: Science and Systems.