Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Candidate Seminar
Dr. Chih-Yuan (Frank) Chiu
University of California, Berkeley
Thursday, March 28, 2024, 10:00-11:00 am
B02 CSL Auditorium or Online via Zoom
Title: Algorithms for Safe and Efficient Mobility in Modern Transportation Networks
Abstract: Navigation in modern transportation systems involves interacting with large numbers of vehicles, both human-operated and self-driving, which raises serious issues of safety and efficiency. First, autonomous vehicles remain unable to consistently operate safely and efficiently in real-life traffic. A key reason is the absence of feedback loops between behavior prediction and motion planning in many autonomy stacks, which limits the ability of autonomous agents to interact intelligently with others. Second, on a societal scale, high traffic loads induce societal-scale externalities, such as excessive commute times and pollution. Unfortunately, conventional mechanisms for congestion management are often computationally intractable and ignore changes in travelers’ route selections over time. In this talk, I will present progress towards addressing these issues, focusing in particular on: (1) Game-theoretic motion planners that capture feedback loops between behavior prediction and path planning in common traffic scenarios; and (2) A dynamic tolling scheme and learning updates to manage congestion on traffic networks of arbitrary structure and scale. I will conclude by describing promising avenues of future work.
Chih-Yuan (Frank) Chiu received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, where he worked on state estimation and path planning for autonomous vehicles, as well as traffic management on transportation networks. Chih-Yuan’s research was supported by a Departmental Fellowship, as well as grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Chih-Yuan received his BS in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 2018, where he was supported, in part, by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) Scholarship Program.
