New Grant: Award Supports Improved Performance of Autonomous Vehicles
June 29, 2023 - Principal investigator: Mohammad Al Faruque, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and co-principal investigator Pramod Khargonekar, UCI Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
Award: $378,000 over three years.
Funding Agency: U.S. Army Automotive Research Center
Project: Adaptive and Efficient Perception for Autonomous Ground Vehicles Operating in Highly Stochastic Environments under Sensing Uncertainties
Military off-road autonomous ground vehicles typically use multiple sensors, large deep-learning models and powerful hardware platforms to perceive the environment and navigate safely at high speeds with strict latency requirements. During AV operations in challenging stochastic environments, some sensing modalities negatively impact perception while increasing energy consumption and latency, which can be detrimental to safety-critical AV missions. This project aims to improve the perception performance of autonomous vehicles by introducing new sensor fusion methods, including adaptation mechanisms. The researchers will study how varying levels of computation constraints and uncertainties due to operational requirements can propagate through sensor fusion-based perception frameworks and determine possible new methods to account for these dynamic variabilities.
