Dr. Edgar Lobaton, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State University, has been awarded $206,192 by the University of California – Berkeley for research on Provably Safe Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems with Humans-in-the-Loop.

The award will run from October 1st, 2012 to September 30th, 2015.

Research Abstract: The automotive sector is one of the richest targets for emerging innovations in Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). Increased content electronics, non-contact sensors, controls and communication with the environment and the driver will change the way we drive and interact with our cars in the near future. However, despite the enormous number of fatalities and injuries on US and world roads, there is an enormous gap between research achievements in autonomous drive and the active safety systems currently available in production vehicles. We propose a paradigm shift which looks at whole cyber physical vehicle/environment/driver and thus address all its three main critical components: (A) the vehicle/environment interaction, (B) the driver uncertainty and (C) the provably-safe intervention under the predicted uncertainty of A and B.  We will develop a novel science for  of Cyber-Physical Systems with the goal of obtaining a provably safe human-centric autonomy where  certification is evidence-based and evolves with the system (as new driver behaviors, scenes, slipping dynamics enter in the database of the CPS we construct in real-time). Robustness is measured against bounded state-dependent uncertainty of a driver/vehicle interaction model and of the scene reconstruction.