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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Title: Autonomous Systems: From Barrier Functions to Model Free Safety
Committee:
Dr. Magnus Egerstedt, ECE, Chair , Advisor
Dr. Samuel Coogan, ECE
Dr. Yorai Wardi, ECE
Dr. Charles Pippin, GTRI
Dr. Zsolt Kira, IC
Abstract: Robotics is now being applied to a diversity of real-world applications where safety is a critical consideration for continued adoption. In this thesis we therefore investigate how to develop algorithms that improve the safety of a system without unduly limiting overall performance. We motivate the work with the example of fixed wing collision avoidance and find that using a model allows for collision avoidance to be guaranteed for arbitrarily many vehicles even under limited communication and sensing constraints. We then employ model free approach and show that this enables the system to be more performant while still improving safety over the original system.