January workshop looks at safety-critical autonomy

A free, full-day workshop, titled “Cognizant Autonomous Systems for Safety Critical Applications (CASSCA),” will be held Jan. 29, co-located with the Institute of Navigation’s International Technical Meeting (ITM) in Reston, Virginia. Workshop information will be posted at www.ion.org/cassca as it becomes available.

Organized by Professor Zak Kassas from the University of California, Riverside, the workshop will feature presentations and panels by experts and leaders from government (National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Air Force Research Laboratory, Department of Transportation), industry (Google, Daimler, and Ford) and academia (The Ohio State University, UC San Diego, University of Southern California).

The workshop will discuss opportunities and challenges (technical, commercial, ethical, and legal) associated with developing fully autonomous systems that are cognizant and trustworthy for safety-critical applications. Examples include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), self-driving cars and unmanned underwater and surface vehicles.

Kassas, director of the Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, & Navigation Laboratory (ASPIN), leads a team of researchers developing reliable and accurate navigation that exploits existing signals of opportunity, rather than GPS, to meet the stringent requirements of fully-autonomous systems, such as UAVs and self-driving cars.

He co-authored two recent cover stories in GPS World, “LTE Steers UAV: Signals of Opportunity Work in Challenged Environments” (April 2017) and “Opportunity for Accuracy:Terrestrial SOPs attractive supplement to GNSS” (March 2016).