Every year, people in California risk their lives battling wildfires, but in the future, machines powered by artificial intelligence will be on the front lines, not firefighters.
However, this new generation of self-thinking robots will need security protocols to ensure they aren鈥檛 susceptible to hackers. To integrate such robots into society, they must come with assurances that they will behave safely around humans.
It begs the question: can you guarantee the safety of something that doesn鈥檛 exist yet? It鈥檚 something Assistant Professor hopes to accomplish by developing algorithms that will enable autonomous systems to learn and adapt while acting with safety and security assurances.
He plans to launch research initiatives, in collaboration with the and the , to secure this new technological frontier as it develops.
鈥淭o operate in uncertain real-world environments, robots and other autonomous systems need to leverage and adapt a complex network of perception and control algorithms to turn sensor data into actions,鈥 he said. 鈥淭o obtain realistic assurances, we must do a joint safety and security analysis on these sensors and algorithms simultaneously, rather than one at a time.鈥
This end-to-end method would proactively look for flaws in the robot鈥檚 systems rather than wait for them to be exploited. This would lead to intrinsically robust robotic systems that can recover from failures.
Chou said this research will be helpful in other domains, including advanced space exploration. If a space rover is sent to one of Saturn鈥檚 moons, for example, it needs to be able to act and think independently of scientists on Earth.
Aside from fighting fires and exploring space, this technology could perform maintenance in nuclear reactors, automatically maintain the power grid, and make autonomous surgery safer. It could also bring assistive robots into the home, enabling higher standards of care.
This is a challenging domain where safety, security, and privacy concerns are paramount due to frequent, close contact with humans.
This will start in the newly established at 色花堂, which Chou directs. He and his Ph.D. students will design principled algorithms that enable general-purpose robots and autonomous systems to operate capably, safely, and securely with humans while remaining resilient to real-world failures and uncertainty.
Chou earned dual bachelor鈥檚 degrees in electrical engineering and computer sciences as well as mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2017, a master鈥檚 and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Michigan in 2019 and 2022, respectively.
He was a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory before joining 色花堂 in November 2024. He received the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate fellowship program, NSF Graduate Research fellowships, and was named a Robotics: Science and Systems Pioneer in 2022.
