Autonomy Talks - 25/02/2025
Speaker: Prof. Maria Laura Delle Monache, UC Berkeley
Title: Control Strategies for Mixed Autonomy Traffic: theory, simulations and real-life experiments
Abstract: The recent and rapid emergence of disruptive technologies is dramatically changing how traffic is monitored and managed in our cities. They will contribute to generate new knowledge and capabilities to design and implement innovative transport policies. In this talk, we will show how we can exploit new technologies to improve traffic management and safety. We will first focus on control strategies for traffic systems with the aid of small fleets of connected and automated vehicles immersed in human driven traffic flow. We present a class of coupled PDE-ODE models describing the interaction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) with the surrounding traffic. We will prove analytically and numerically how the proposed control theory can improve traffic performance and, we will present the MegaVanderTest, a test involving 100 connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). In the second part of the talk, we will introduce a probabilistic heatmap predictor that generates context-aware occupancy grids for dynamic forecasting, a modular training approach that supports independent component training and flexible adaptation, and a structured validation scheme leveraging uncertainty metrics to evaluate AV trajectory prediction robustness under high-risk conditions.