Risk Aware Planning and Control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

June 2023 – June 2025

Objective
The goal of the project is to design reactive, intelligent planning and control algorithms for underwater vehicles which quantify and reason about risk as well as incorporate machine learning. This will enable the use of AUVs for more autonomous environmental data collection with reduced human involvement and, therefore, reduced human risk.

Background
Autonomous underwater vehicles have great potential for environmental monitoring and exploration, but there are important technical challenges that prevent their widespread use. Some of the major challenges are that GPS location information is not available underwater, communication underwater is limited, and there may be significant vehicle drift due to local hydrodynamic disturbances. As a result, it is difficult to ensure high levels of reliability for these vehicles. To bridge the reliability gap, this project aims to design and test planning and control algorithms that explicitly reason about uncertainty and produce intelligent policies to minimize that uncertainty while gathering information about the vehicle’s environment.

About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Chelsea Sidrane began her studies with a Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at Cornell University, where she developed an interest in dynamical systems and control theory. She went on to study machine learning and robot planning in her Master’s studies at Stanford University before beginning a PhD in the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory focused on verifying neural networks. She defended her thesis, “Neural Network Verification for Nonlinear Systems”, in the summer of 2022. She is now a Digital Futures Postdoctoral Research Fellow at KTH based in the Planiacs group at the Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning (RPL).

Main supervisor
Jana Tumova, Associate Professor in the Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning, KTH

Co-supervisors
Dimos Dimarogonas, Professor in the Division of Decision and Control Systems, KTH
Ivan Stenius, Associate Professor in Vessel Engineering & Solid Mechanics, KTH

Watch the recorded presentation at the Digitalize in Stockholm 2023 event: