LERO
ABOUT
Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, brings together expert software teams from universities and institutes of technology across Ireland in a co-ordinated centre of research excellence with a strong industry focus. Lero’s research spans a wide range of application domains from driverless cars to artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, fintech, govtech, smart communities, agtech and healthtech. Lero’s overall vision is to establish Ireland as a location synonymous with high-quality software research and development, to the extent that ‘Irish software’ can enter the lexicon in the same way as ‘German automotive’ or ‘Scandinavian design’. Since it was founded in 2005, Lero has become one of the best-known, and most highly regarded, software research centres in the world.
Projects
Project Title: Blended Autonomy Vehicles – BAV Spoke
Autonomous Systems (ASs) represent a disruptive component of many industries which are key to Ireland’s future growth. This Spoke has brought together the key companies, scientists and engineers to build world-leading capability in AS, and apply it to Automotive, Field Robotics and Industrial Vehicle sectors.
We frame the development of an AS as a multi-objective optimisation (MOO) problem, where we optimise a set of objectives through incorporating and trading off multiple constraints. This is novel: although MOO has been applied to product development in the past, it has focused on technical aspects (e.g., weight/safety/cost trade-offs), and has not incorporated the legal and social aspects critical to AS development.
The underlying research questions for our Spoke are to:
- Understand the objectives and constraints necessary for developing a holistic AS;
- Develop a design methodology and architecture for AS software that is common across multiple application domains;
- Study the trade-offs in delivered software as we vary the parameters of the different objectives and constraints.
