Lynn Cook

Safely exploiting the mobility limits of a vehicle is an essential capability for autonomous driving in time and safety critical applications such as extreme maneuvers in military operations or high-speed collision avoidance on roads. However, the traditional approach of treating planning and control problems separately leads to overly conservative solutions and limits such exploitation. To address this gap, we propose a paradigm shift from separate to combined treatment of planning and control problems, which allows for solving both problems with a consistent understanding of the capabilities and limits of the vehicle for improving performance and safety.

An EQ-4B Global Hawk, one of the United States’ most advanced and expensive unmanned aerial vehicles, lost stability and crashed in 2011 because a single screw loosened. In 2016, a Union Pacific train derailed in Mosier, Oregon due to a single loose bolt. It released 42,000 gallons of crude oil into the local environment. These two events (and many others) highlight our lack of knowledge pertaining to the long-term evolution of nonlinearities and their effect on the structure’s health and dynamics.

Diffusion processes refer to a class of stochastic processes driven by Brownian motion. They have been widely used in various applications, ranging from engineering to science to finance. In this talk, I will discuss my experiences with diffusion and how this powerful tool has shaped our research programs.

As an important medical tool, ultrasound has been used for diagnostics and therapy for decades. Unlike X-ray based imaging, ultrasound does not rely on radiative activities that makes it much safer for medical applications. Comparing to optics, ultrasound has a much higher penetration depth into the tissue. These advantages make ultrasound the dominant imaging method for abdominal organ observation.