Cyber-Physical Cloud Computing

Abstract:

Computation advances in physical time, but embedded computing has found value   in logical time programming. Likewise, robotic systems can be simplified by programming in logical space, even though robots live and move in physical space. Our tools ask the roboticist to program on a logical abstraction of the physical. The principal new products are two drivers. One handles the problem of keeping the logical model consistent with physical data. The other enables logical control actions to have physical effect. This logical-­‐physical relation is formalized as a model theory. When programs have the Actor semantics and the logical model is bigraphs, the operational semantics of the programming model is that of BigActors. Therefore this application builds on theoretical work executed in the first two years of the project. The concept has been field tested with the Portugal Air Force. Sergeants and Officers who are not scientists were able to program in our logical model. This shows our logical programming model is intuitive and useable by technical staff, some without college degrees. The logical programs were used to control robots executing a bilge dumping interdiction mission in the Atlantic with the European Maritime Safety Agency and the Portugal Air Force.