Egerstedt–who is the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering–was honored for his paper, "Permissive Barrier Certificates for Safe Stabilization Using Sum-of-Squares.” His coauthors are Li Wang, a Ph.D. alumnus of the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab (led by Egerstedt) and who now works at Tesla, and Dongkun Han, a postdoctoral fellow in aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan. 

For safety-critical systems, such as autonomous robots, it is important that they only operate in regions from which they can be stabilized, so that they never end up in situations from which it is impossible to recover. But, at the same time, these systems must satisfy various additional safety constraints, such as unmanned aircraft not getting too close to other aircraft, or the forces and torques provided by the actuators not exceeding their limits. This paper shows how to compute the largest possible such "safe stabilization region” in which the system can operate by combining ideas from nonlinear dynamical systems, optimization, and algebraic geometry.