MMAE 593 Seminar Series: Ersin Das

The School of Engineering, Applied Science, and Health presents its MMAE 593 seminar series featuring guest speaker Ersin Das, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Tech, who will present “Robust and Adaptive Safety-Critical Control of Autonomous Systems.” This event is open to the public and will take place on Wednesday, October 14, from 12:45–1:45 p.m. in the Rettaliata Auditorium (RE 104).

Abstract

Autonomous systems must operate safely in the presence of uncertain dynamics, external disturbances, and imperfect state information. Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a systematic approach to enforcing safety, but constructing them for nonlinear systems with bounded inputs remains challenging. In this talk, I will present backup CBFs, which address this challenge through safe set expansion using predictions under a verified backup controller. These predictions depend on the system model. Therefore, uncertainty can invalidate the resulting safety guarantees. I will discuss robust and adaptive methods that combine online estimation and learning with certified error bounds to preserve safety under model uncertainty and time-varying disturbances. Throughout the talk, I will illustrate the efficacy of these methods with applications to robotic systems.

Biography

Ersin Das is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Tech. He was previously a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech. He received his master’s in mechatronics engineering from Istanbul Technical University and his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Hacettepe University. His research interests include robust and safe control, state estimation, and machine learning for robotics and autonomous systems.