On XYZ motion planning for autonomous vehicles with active suspension systems 

Abstract: Motion planners are a class of critical modules present in almost all autonomous vehicles. Generally speaking, a planner is responsible for generating a safe, comfortable, and dynamically feasible trajectory through the  environment.  Most of the previously developed motion planning methods focus on a 2D setting, in which only in-plane (longitudinal and lateral) motions of the vehicle are taken into consideration. In this talk, a novel xyz-motion planning problem will be presented to account for not only the xy-motion, but also the vertical motion and active suspension control inputs, by making use of upcoming road surface data. Indeed, with the rapid development of active suspension technology, it is believed that active suspension systems will become indispensable to AVs in the near future, for the significant comfort and safety improvements they provide. In addition, the recent development of perception and mapping technologies is feasible to provide accurate road surface information.  As a result, the actuation components of an AV will also include the suspension actuator forces, and motion planning for AVs will need to be extended from the xy-plane to the xyz-space.

Bio: Dr. Yu Jiang received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from New York University. Currently, he is a senior technical specialist with the CTO Office at ClearMotion, Billerica, MA. Prior to joining the company, he worked as a software engineer at MathWorks, the controls tech lead at ISEE AI, and an independent technical consultant for various tech startup companies in the US and Canada. His research interests include learning-based control and its applications in intelligent vehicles. He received the Shimemura Young Author Prize at the 9th Asian Control Conference in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2013. He is the co-author of the book “Robust Adaptive Dynamic Programming”, Wiley 2017. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Control Engineering Practice.