Location: Wallace Hall, Room 209

Featured Speaker: Dr. Melkior Ornik, Assistant Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Attendees: All m88体育 students, staff, faculty, alumni and industry partners are invited to attend. 

Abstract: The development of high-level autonomy, necessarily requiring real-time adaptation to significant adverse events, faces a critical conceptual challenge: if the controller has no system model following the adversity, and no prior opportunity to collect data, how can we form meaningful guarantees about system behavior? In fact, how do we know whether the system's task is still feasible? Indeed, an intelligent planner should quickly understand which tasks can certifiably be completed given the limited current knowledge, and then formulate appropriate control laws. To move towards that goal, in this talk I will present an emergent twin efforts of design-time guaranteed resilience and mission-time guaranteed performance. These approaches compute a set of tasks completable under all system dynamics consistent with the planner's partial knowledge, provide bounds on the time and energy required to complete the tasks, and synthesize appropriate policies using online learning and adaptation. In describing this framework, this talk will briefly present several applications to aerial vehicles, identifying promising future directions of research such as planning for complex tasks, verifiable performance with faulty sensing, and data-driven incremental certification.

Biography: Melkior Ornik is an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, also affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory, as well as the Discovery Partners Institute in Chicago. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto in 2017. His research focuses on developing theory and algorithms for control, learning and task planning in autonomous systems that operate in uncertain, changing, or adversarial environments, as well as in scenarios where only limited knowledge of the system is available. He is a senior member of AIAA and IEEE, his recent work has been extensively funded by NASA grants and Department of Defense programs. He has been awarded the 2023 Air Force Young Investigator Program award, and recently selected for the 2025 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program award.