Resilience of Autonomous Systems: A Step Beyond Adaptation
Melkior Ornik | Assistant Professor; Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The ability of a system to correctly respond to a sudden adverse event is critical for high-level autonomy in complex, changing, or remote environments. By assuming continuing structural knowledge about the system, classical methods of adaptive or robust control largely attempt to design control laws which enable the system to complete its original task even after an adverse event. However, catastrophic events such as physical system damage may simply render the original task impossible to complete. In that case, design of any control law that attempts to complete the task is doomed to be unsuccessful. Instead, the system should recognize the task as impossible to complete, propose an alternative that is certifiably completable given the current knowledge, and formulate a control law that drives the system to complete this new task.