Shuhao Qi

Shuhao Qi, Qiling Aori, Luyao Zhang et al.

Autonomous driving in interactive traffic scenarios remains challenging because of the mutual influence among vehicles and the inherent uncertainty of surrounding agents. Several model predictive control (MPC) formulations have been proposed to address this challenge, each adopting a different model of inter-agent interaction. While higher-fidelity interaction models enable more intelligent behavior, they incur substantially greater computational cost. Since strong interactions arise only occasionally in real traffic, a practical strategy for balancing performance and computational overhead is to invoke an appropriate controller based on situational demands. To this end, we first conduct a comparative study to assess and hierarchize the interactive capabilities of different MPC formulations. Building on this hierarchy, we then develop a neural network-based classifier for situation-aware switching among these controllers. We demonstrate that, by invoking the most advanced interactive MPC only in rare but critical situations and relying on a basic MPC in the majority of situations, situation-aware switching substantially improves overall performance while significantly reducing computational load.

Teun van de Laar, Zengjie Zhang, Shuhao Qi et al.

It has been an ambition of many to control a robot for a complex task using natural language (NL). The rise of large language models (LLMs) makes it closer to coming true. However, an LLM-powered system still suffers from the ambiguity inherent in an NL and the uncertainty brought up by LLMs. This paper proposes a novel LLM-based robot motion planner, named \textit{VernaCopter}, with signal temporal logic (STL) specifications serving as a bridge between NL commands and specific task objectives. The rigorous and abstract nature of formal specifications allows the planner to generate high-quality and highly consistent paths to guide the motion control of a robot. Compared to a conventional NL-prompting-based planner, the proposed VernaCopter planner is more stable and reliable due to less ambiguous uncertainty. Its efficacy and advantage have been validated by two small but challenging experimental scenarios, implying its potential in designing NL-driven robots.