Resilient and Secure Control Design for Intelligent Autonomous Systems under Cyber-Physical Attacks

Mechanical Engineering Professor Hamid Jafarnejad Sani

Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology

ABSTRACT

Autonomous systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), medical and industrial robots, and self-driving cars operate under uncertainties due to dynamic environments, interaction with humans, system failures, and even malicious cyberattacks. Ensuring security and safety is the first step to make the solutions using such systems certifiable and scalable. Many grand challenges need to be dealt with before machine learning methods become practical in intelligent, safety-critical systems. My research aims to address safe and secure control of autonomous systems by integrating the tools from robust and adaptive control with machine learning and cyber-physical security methods. We conduct experiments using unmanned aerial/ground robot platforms to validate the theoretical solutions.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Hamid Jafarnejad Sani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology and the director of the Safe Autonomous Systems Lab (SAS Lab). Before joining the faculty at Stevens, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Dr. Jafarnejad Sani received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from UIUC in 2018, where he worked in the Advanced Controls Research Laboratory. He got his B.S. and M.S. degrees both in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tehran in 2011 and the University of Calgary in 2013, respectively. His research interests include control, optimization, robotics, machine learning, and cyber-physical security. In particular, he is interested in resilient control of intelligent autonomous systems in uncertain and adversarial environments.