June 3, 2021

Traffic21 Director Raj Rajkumar presented the keynote, “Are Autonomous Vehicles A Grand Challenge for CPS or AI?” at today’s 2021 NSF Cyber-Physical Systems Principal Investigators’ Meeting.

“Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have garnered immense interest and investments over the past 14 years, but practical deployments still do not seem viable in the near future. Did anything go wrong? From its very origins in the late 2000’s, the cyber-physical systems community has deemed AVs as a grand challenge. Meanwhile, thanks to remarkable advances in machine learning since the early 2010’s, the AI community has also been targeting AVs as a poster child to measure its progress and considers AV as an AI problem to be solved. This talk will provide a synopsis of the speaker’s work on AVs and the current state of the art. In order to stimulate a larger debate, the talk will then delve into where AI can and does contribute, and where the CPS community must continue to play a significant role. Research questions that can and must be addressed by the CPS community will be posed.”