Abstract: Autonomous systems are heterogeneous dynamical systems in which software components interact tightly with physical ones. At the core of these systems, there exists embedded control software which plays a crucial role by controlling physical variables (e.g., steering angle, velocity, temperature, etc.) through multiple sensors and actuators. Although autonomous systems are becoming widely ubiquitous due to rapid advances in computation and communication, the development of embedded control software running on them is still ad hoc and error prone.
 
In this talk, I will propose a transformative design process for autonomous systems, in which embedded control software is synthesized from correctness requirements in a systematic and formal manner. To tackle the underlying design complexity, I propose a divide and conquer strategy to scale the proposed techniques by leveraging the natural structure present in the system and breaking the design problem into semi-independent ones. I will leverage the small-gain type reasoning, finite abstractions, and barrier certificates as key tools to tackle the underlying design complexity. I will illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed results on some case studies. I will show that our proposed results can handle large-scale autonomous systems, which would not have been possible to tackle using existing approaches.

Bio: Majid Zamani is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. He received a B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2005 from Isfahan University of Technology, Iran, an M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2007 from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, an MA degree in Mathematics and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering both in 2012 from University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Between September 2012 and December 2013, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Delft Centre for Systems and Control, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. From May 2014 to January 2019, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. He received an ERC starting grant award from the European Research Council in 2018.
 
His research interests include formal verification and control of (stochastic) hybrid systems, embedded control software synthesis, information-based control, networked control systems, and compositional analysis and synthesis of interconnected systems.

https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/190280621