Future Mobility: Cloud-Enabled Automotive Decision-Making Systems

Interest in employing cloud computing for automotive applications is growing to support computation and data intensive tasks. The cloud can provide access to "big data" as well as real-time crowd-sourced information. Smart utilization of on-demand cloud resources can increase situation awareness and provide additional functionalities.

In this talk, I will first present the Vehicle-to-Cloud-to-Vehicle framework and discuss its opportunities and challenges. The focus of the talk will be the exploitation of automotive vehicles to crowd-source road information. In this research, we developed an optimal state estimator for systems driven by jump-diffusion process. The developed estimator, together with an input observer, was used to estimate road profile and detect road anomalies such as potholes and speed bumps. I will also present an evolving clustering algorithm that is used to process the anomaly reports. Future work on Reinforcement Learning and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles will also be discussed.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan State University. My main research interests include Autonomous Vehicles, Intelligent Transportation System, Reinforcement Learning, Vehicle Dyanmics, and Optimal Control. I obtained my M.S. (2013) and Ph.D. (2015) in Aerospace Engineering (flight dynamics and control) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. As an undergraduate, I have studied at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Department of Civil Aviation, in China. I defended my Ph.D. dissertation on the topic of Developments in Estimation and Control for Cloud-Enabled Automotive Vehicles. I was very fortunately advised by Prof. Ilya V. Kolmanovsky and Prof. Ella M. Atkins.

From June 2010 to July 2012, I worked at Shanghai Area Control Center as an Air Traffic Controller. In the summers of 2014 and 2015, I was an intern at Ford Research and Advanced Engineering, Dearborn MI. From January 2016 to August 2017, I worked at General Motors in the NextGen Powertrain Control group, Milforrd MI.