Autonomy and the Future of Urban Mobility
Emilio Frazzoli, PhD
Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, nuTonomy
Self-driving vehicles are ubiquitous in the news today. Hardly a week goes by without some new media coverage of the technology. As part of Volpe’s new speaker series, The Future of Transportation: Safety, Opportunity, and Innovation, Dr. Emilio Frazzoli discussed recent advances in the design of autonomous vehicle systems, ranging from a single vehicle to a fleet capable of serving the mobility needs of a whole city.
His talk covered recent developments in real-time planning, control, and decision making for autonomous vehicles on public roads, where they have to comply not only with basic safety constraints, such as collision avoidance, but also with rules of the road, in a dynamic environment shared with other vehicles as well as pedestrians.
Dr. Frazzoli considered the operation of a fleet of shared autonomous vehicles, providing mobility-on-demand services to customers in an urban environment. Based on real data from several cities worldwide, Dr. Frazzoli addressed the potential impact of autonomous shared cars on urban mobility.
About the Speaker
Dr. Emilio Frazzoli is a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a Laurea degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Rome, “Sapienza,” Italy, in 1994, and a PhD degree from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of MIT in 2001. Before returning to MIT in 2006, he held faculty positions at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at the University of California, Los Angeles.
He is currently the director of the Transportation@MIT initiative, and the lead principal investigator of the Future Urban Mobility IRG of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). He was the recipient of the IEEE George S. Axelby award in 2015, and a NSF CAREER award in 2002. He is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a senior member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Frazzoli's current research interests focus primarily on autonomous vehicles, mobile robotics, and transportation systems, and in general lie in the area of planning and control for mobile cyber-physical systems.
Read more of Emilio Frazzoli's biography.
News and Video
Read the news story and view the video from this event.
The views of the presenter do not necessarily reflect those of U.S. DOT.