Hello autonomy world!
The Autonomous Systems Laboratory (ASLab) is a research group of UPM focused on the science and technology of autonomy. We investigate architectures and engineering methods for the construction of robust autonomous systems.
Autonomy is a technical property of systems that make them capable of sustained provision of a particular service even in the presence of major uncertainties and disturbances in the service demand, the context of service execution and the internal alterations that the system itself may be suffering.
We acknowledge that the road is very long in front of us and that it will take a lot of time until we reach an ultimate solution to the problem of building artificial robust autonomous systems. However, we expect to achieve some intermediate results that could be operational for the engineering of useful systems in many domains in a short/medium timescale.
While we center our application focus in a reduced set of domains, we pursue theoretical and engineering results of universal applicability in the broad domain of technical systems: from process control to robotics, from embedded devices to internet services. Any domain can profit from our results in robust autonomy.
ASLab, while focusing in the long term objective of science and technology for universal autonomy, has several focused research lines around specific topics of relevance:
- Integrated cognitive control architectures
- Model-based control systems
- Ontologies for autonomous systems
- Development processes and tooling for complex controllers
- Reusable control components
- Real-time middleware and platforms for distributed control
- Rettargetability of embedded control components
- Technology of systems self-awareness
- Philosophical implications of cognition and autonomy