This three-year award supports U.S.-Portugal cooperative research between the PATH project of the University of California at Berkeley, led by Parvin Varaiya, and the Systems and Robotics Group of the Engineering Faculty (SRG) of the University of Porto; the faculty group is led by Fernando Lobo Pereira. The objective of the PATH project is to design automated highway systems so that capacity and safety of surface transportation are increased substantially. This project is part of the Federal Highway Authority's Intelligent Transportation Systems Program. SRG has been engaged in a project of oceanographic field study involving the coordinated operation of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles, based on the concept of a Generalized Vehicle (GV). The objective of the proposed collaboration is to apply the theory of interactive hybrid systems to the coordinated movement of multiple vehicles, and the design and implementation of real-time control algorithms for such movement.
The U.S. group brings to this collaboration their expertise in theory for hybrid control and verification and a test environment, the automated highway systems project. This is complemented by the application of the GV concept to multiple autonomous underwater vehicles developed by the Portuguese group at The University of Porto. The project is expected to take advantage of the application scenarios as well as of the complementary experiences to identify more efficient ways of solving the problem of robust low-cost navigation for land and underwater vehicles.
