About this event

Abstract

Unmanned vehicles have become prevalent in both military and civilian applications, significantly impacting our daily lives. Among them, the use of a team or swarm of unmanned vehicles stands out due to their adaptability, versatility, and ability to collaborate effectively toward shared objectives, featuring inherent redundancy. A crucial research question arises: how can unmanned vehicles be deployed and controlled collaboratively to efficiently and autonomously accomplish given missions in uncertain and dynamic environments? This challenge needs to consider various factors such as dynamic platform constraints, diverse sensor/information types, and level of decentralization under limited computation and communication resources.

To achieve fully autonomous cooperative unmanned vehicle systems that require minimal human intervention while ensuring safety, timeliness, and appropriateness, several key aspects of unmanned vehicles need to be addressed. These include: i) enhancing autonomy through the development of high-level decision-making and planning algorithms; ii) augmenting situational awareness with sensor and information fusion techniques, potentially integrating domain knowledge for safer operations and superior mission performance; and iii) seamlessly integrating decision-making, planning, and situational awareness to create a synergistic system. This seminar will showcase the ongoing research efforts of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at UNIST, focusing on the above challenges towards more and better autonomy for unmanned vehicles and emphasizing the utilization of AI and machine learning approaches.

Biography

Hyondong Oh received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in aerospace engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea, in 2004 and 2010, respectively, and then he acquired a Ph.D. on autonomous surveillance and target tracking guidance using multiple UAVs from Cranfield University, United Kingdom, in 2013. He worked as a lecturer in autonomous unmanned vehicles at Loughborough University, United Kingdom in 2014-2016. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), South Korea. His research interests cover autonomy and decision making, cooperative control and path planning, nonlinear guidance and control, estimation and sensor/information fusion for unmanned systems.