Alireza Pedram

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. The goal of my research is to develop theoretical and computational methods to reduce the computation and communication loads in the decision-making process of autonomous agents. In the future information-rich autonomy, agents will have to be able to process a huge amount of information in an online manner with bounded perceptual/communicational resources. I aim to develop frameworks helping autonomous agents strategically analyze/communicate a small portion of available information without compromising performance or safety. In doing so, I employ different tools from diverse fields, such as motion planning, stochastic optimal control theory, information theory, and optimization. To demonstrate the utility of proposed frameworks, I also test and evaluate the performance of the designed systems through numerical simulations and hardware experiments. Some applications of my research include enabling online decision-making and agile maneuvering in mobile robotics (like micro-aerial vehicles) and mitigating communication load in large-scale networks such as fleets of autonomous vehicles.