Flavia Acerbo
Flavia Sofia Acerbo is a researcher at Siemens Digital Industries Software, based in Leuven. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering in 2017 and her Master’s degree in Mechatronic Engineering in 2019, both cum laude and from Politecnico di Torino. After graduating, she joined Siemens Digital Industries Software, where she is currently working on a PhD project with KU Leuven on human imitation for autonomous driving comfort, which tries to develop methodologies to learn human-like controllers from driving data to improve passenger perception in automated vehicles. Her research interests lie in the intersection between optimal control and machine learning, specifically around learning-based Model Predictive Control and Reinforcement Learning.
Project description
The PhD project aims at developing a methodology to systematically include a human-like driving style into Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) development, providing both safe and personalized driving. The study relies on demonstrations performed by the considered user and mixed-real virtual design and testing. The approach should be easily adapted to various automated driving tasks with minimal use of domain knowledge, automatically inferring the key parameters that describe the demonstrated driving style from high-dimensional multi-source datasets.
Publications
Evaluation of MPC-based Imitation Learning for Human-like Autonomous Driving Proceedings Article
In: 22nd IFAC World Congress, pp. 4871-4876, Elsevier Ltd, Yokohama, Japan, 2023, ISSN: 2405-8963.