Autonomous innovations in an uncertain world

Jonathan How and his team at the Aerospace Controls Laboratory develop planning algorithms that allow autonomous vehicles to navigate dynamic environments without colliding. MIT Jonathan How's research interests span the gamut of autonomous vehicles - from airplanes and spacecraft to unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) and cars. He is particularly focused on the design and implementation of distributed robust planning algorithms to coordinate multiple autonomous vehicles capable of navigating in dynamic environments. For the past year or so, the Richard Cockburn Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a team of researchers from the Aerospace Controls Laboratory at MIT have been developing a trajectory planning system that allows a fleet of drones to operate in the same airspace without colliding with each other. Put another way, it is a multi-vehicle collision avoidance project, and it has real-world implications around cost savings and efficiency for a variety of industries including agriculture and defense. The test facility for the project is the Kresa Center for Autonomous Systems, an 80-by-40-foot space with 25-foot ceilings, custom designed for MIT's work with autonomous vehicles - including How's swarm of UAVs regularly buzzing around the center's high bay. To avoid collision, each UAV must compute its path-planning trajectory onboard and share it with the rest of the machines using a wireless communication network.