Kristina Miller is a senior PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research goals are to make autonomous systems safe and beneficial for society. She is the creator of one of the state-of-the-art software tools, FACTEST, for planning and control of autonomous systems. Kristina is also played a leading role in creating the simulation-based autonomous racing competition GRAIC, which was held as part of CPS-IoTWeek 2021, 2022, and 2023. She has significant experience in working with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) through the Universities Space Research Association Space Scholars program. In Summer of 2021 and 2022, she worked on developing hybrid controllers for autonomous satellite maneuvers with Dr. Sean Phillips. In 2023, she won the Rambus Computer Engineering Fellowship, which recognizes graduate students for outstanding research. In the past, she was a teaching assistant for senior capstone projects and has been a member of several honors societies.
Safe operation of cyber-physical systems is critical as autonomy becomes widespread. There are many applications, such as transportation using autonomous vehicles, flight control systems on aircraft, and rendezvous missions between multiple satellites in space. In my research, I address the safe autonomy problem by generating guaranteed safe logic for nonlinear systems by combining techniques such as reachability and Lyapunov analysis from control theory with program synthesis tools such as satisfiability solvers or mixed integer linear programs. This line of work is called controller synthesis, and I originally applied it to solve reach-avoid problems for systems operating in static environments. To address dynamic and partially unknown environments, I abstract away perception using a perception oracle and show that the synthesis techniques still work. Finally, I combine synthesis with game theory to synthesize controllers for multi-agent scenarios. To demonstrate these techniques applicabilty, I use them to address formal synthesis for space autonomy.