CICHELLA'S CAS LAB A s s i s ta n t P ro f e s s o r V e n a n z i o C i c h e l l a ’ s newly created
Cooperative Autonomous Systems (CAS) lab is producing compelling research! The lab itself is a 1,000 square foot laboratory equipped with a state of the art motion capture system which provides real-time data of the positions, angles, and velocity of the drones the researchers fly through the lab. The 10 ground robots and 40 drones are used to test motion planning, trajectory tracking, coordination control, and collision avoidance algorithms. Cichella joined the University at the beginning of this academic year and affiliated with the National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS) as well. His research interests lie at the intersection between robotics, control theory, and autonomous systems. Specifically, he is interested in developing and implementing solutions to nonlinear control and optimal control problems, that enable autonomous systems to execute complex tasks in real-world environments safely and reliably. Cichella explains that, worldwide, there has been growing interest in the development of algorithms that enable heterogeneous autonomous vehicles, including space, aerial, ground, and marine vehicles, to execute missions in a cooperative fashion. The use of a cooperative group of vehicles, rather than a single heavily equipped vehicle, provides robustness to system failures, increases system overall reliability, and improves mission efficiency. However, despite significant progress in cooperative control, several problems remain to be addressed to enable safe and robust execution of multiple vehicle missions in the presence of vehicles failures, communication faults, complex environment and vehicle dynamics. co l l a b o r at i o n w i t h the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign (UIUC), the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS, Monterey, CA), and the Instituto Superior TĂŠcnico (IST, Lisbon, Portugal), Cichella works on the development,
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Spring 2019