Youmin Zhang, Concordia University

Title: Making Autonomous Systems Smarter, Safer, More Reliable and More Resilient towards Trusty Applications

Abstract

Although the concepts on Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) and Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) have been extensively investigated worldwide since the 1970’s, the two catastrophic crashes of Boeing 737 MAX8 airplanes have highlighted the necessity and urgency for FDD and FTC research & development. On the other hand, Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Autonomous Cars (AVs), Autonomous Robots (ARs), and other transportation vehicles on the land, on/under the water are gaining more and more attention and rapid development over the last few years due to their more powerful and cost-effective uses in various applications. In this talk, a brief overview of the challenges and latest developments on making these uncrewed/autonomous systems smarter, safer, more reliable and more resilient in terms of Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) integrating with Remote Sensing (RS) techniques for autonomous and reliable applications will be presented first, then recent developments carried out at our group will be introduced as case studies. In particular, new developments on autonomous control, FDD, FTC, and Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Control (FTCC) techniques towards autonomous, safe and secure operation and trusty applications of autonomous systems to the forest fire monitoring tasks and smart grids in the presence of physical-faults and cyber-attacks will be presented.