Trustworthy Autonomy

Autonomous Systems offer hope towards moving away from mechanized, unsafe, manual, often inefficient practices. The last decade has seen several small, but important, steps towards making this dream into reality. These advancements have helped us to achieve limited autonomy in several places, such as, driving, factory floors, surgeries, wearables, and home assistants, etc. Nevertheless, autonomous systems are required to operate in a wide range of environments with uncertainties (viz., sensor errors, timing errors, dynamic nature of the environment, etc.). Such environmental uncertainties, even when present in small amounts, can have drastic impact on the safety of the system—thus hampering the goal of achieving higher degree of autonomy, especially in safety critical domains.

To this end, our research is on developing formal techniques that can verify and design autonomous systems for safety, even under the presence of such uncertainties, allowing for their trustworthy deployment in the real world. This area of research can be referred to as Trustworthy Autonomy, which lies at the intersection of Formal Methods, Real-Time and Embedded Systems, Control Theory with applications in Robotics, Automotive, Industrial and Home Automation Systems. Check out the research page for details, and our list of publications here.