Combining Computing, Communications and Controls in Safety Critical Systems
Professor Richard Murray
Caltech
SWS Distinguished Lecture Series
Richard M. Murray received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He is currently the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control & Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech. Murray's research is in the application of feedback and control to networked systems, with applications in biology and autonomy. Current projects include analysis and design biomolecular feedback circuits, synthesis of discrete decision-making protocols for reactive systems, and design of highly resilient architectures for autonomous systems.
Flight critical subsystems in aerospace vehicles must achieve probability of failure rates of less than 1 failure in 10^9 flight hours (i.e. less than 1 failure per 100,000 years of operation). Systems that achieve this level of reliability are hard to design, hard to verify, and hard to validate, especially if software is involved. In this talk, I will talk about some of the challenges that the aerospace community faces in designing systems with this level of reliability and how tools from formal methods and control theory might help. I will also describe some of the my group’s work in synthesis of reactive protocols for hybrid systems and its applications to design of safety critical systems.