The objective of this research is to develop foundations for the newly emerging generation of networked cyber-physical systems. The approach is based on a distributed logic of cyber-physical systems together with distributed cross-layer control and optimization strategies to enabled local actions to maintain or improve the satisfaction of system goals. The framework will be implemented first in simulation, then on one of SRI's robot platforms, and demonstrated in the context of networked mobile robotic teams, a particularly challenging application. Networked cyber-physical systems present many intellectual challenges not suitably addressed by existing computing paradigms. They must achieve system-wide objectives through local, asynchronous actions, using distributed control loops through the environment. A key challenge is to develop a robust computational foundation that supports a wide spectrum of system operation between autonomy and cooperation to adapt to uncertainties, changes, failures, and resource constraints, in particular to limitations of computational, energy, and networking resources. The results will have a variety of applications including distributed surveillance, instrumented pervasive spaces, crisis response, medical systems, green buildings, self-assembling structures, networked space/satellite missions, and distributed critical infrastructure monitoring and control. There is also potential for integration into SRI's commercial robotic platform. Results will be publicly available from a project web site, and tutorial material will be developed for students and researchers. A multi-disciplinary research seminar will be sponsored by SRI. The coPI is female with a strong record of mentoring female students and young researchers, including the project's female postdoc.

The objective of this research is to address a fundamental question in cyber-physical systems: What is the ideal structure of systems that detect critical events such as earthquakes by using data from large numbers of sensors held and managed by ordinary people in the community? The approach is to develop theory about widely-distributed sense and respond systems, using dynamic and possibly unreliable networks using sensors and responders installed and managed by ordinary citizens, and to apply the theory to problems important to society, such as responding to earthquakes. Intellectual Merit: This research develops theory and prototype implementations of community-based sense-and-respond systems that enable people help one another in societal crises. The number of participants in such systems may change rapidly; some participants may be unreliable and some may even deliberately attack systems; and the structures of networks change as crises unfold. Such systems must function in rare critical situations; so designs, analyses and tests of these systems must give confidence that they will function when the crisis hits. The proposed research will show how to design systems with organic growth, unreliable components and connections, security against rogue components, and methods of demonstrating reliability. Broader Impact: People want to help one another in a crisis. Cheap sensors, mobile phones, and laptops enable people to use information technology to help. This research empowers ordinary citizens collaborate to overcome crises. The researchers collaborate with the US Geological Service, Southern California Edison, and Microsoft, and will host 3,000 students at a seismic facility

The objective of this research is to integrate user control with automated reflexes in the human-machine interface. The approach, taking inspiration from biology, analyzes control-switching issues in brain-computer interfaces. A nonhuman primate will perform a manual task while movement- and touch-related brain signals are recorded. While a robotic hand replays the movements, electronic signals will be recorded from touch sensors on the robot?s fingers, then mapped to touch-based brain signals, and used to give the subject tactile sensation via direct cortical stimulation. Context-dependent transfers of authority between the subject and reflex-like controls will be developed based on relationships between sensor signals and command signals. Issues of mixed authority and context awareness have general applicability in human-machine systems. This research advances methods for providing tactile feedback from a remote manipulator, dividing control appropriate to human and machine capabilities, and transferring authority in a smooth, context-dependent manner. These principles are essential to any cyber-physical system requiring robustness in the face of uncertainty, control delays, or limited information flow. The resulting transformative methods of human-machine communication and control will have applications for robotics (space, underwater, military, rescue, surgery, assistive, prosthetic), haptics, biomechanics, and neuroscience. Underrepresented undergraduates will be recruited from competitive university programs at Arizona State University and Mexico's Tec de Monterrey University. Outreach projects will engage the public and underrepresented school-aged children through interactive lab tours, instructional modules, and public lectures on robotics, human-machine systems, and social and ethical implications of neuroprostheses.

The objective of this research is to develop models, methods and tools for capturing and processing of events and actions in cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a manner that does not violate the underlying physics or computational logic. The project approach uses a novel notion of cyber-physical objects (CPO) to capture the mobility and localization of computation in cyber-physical systems using recent advances in geolocation and the Internet infrastructure and supports novel methods for spatiotemporal resource discovery. Project innovations include a model for computing spatiotemporal relationships among events of interests in the physical and logical parts of a CPS, and its use in a novel cyberspatial reference model. Using this model the project builds a framework for locating cyber-physical application services and an operating environment for these services. The project plan includes an experimental platform to demonstrate capabilities for building new OS services for CPS applications including collaborative control applications drawn from the intermodal transportation system. The project will enable design and analysis of societal scale applications such as the transportation and electrical power grid that also include a governance structure. It will directly contribute to educating an engineering talent pool by offering curricular training that range from degree programs in embedded systems to seminars and technology transfer opportunities coordinated through the CalIT2 institute at UCSD and the Institute for Sensing Systems (ISS) at OSU. The team will collaborate with the non-profit Milwaukee Institute to explore policies and mechanisms for enterprise governance systems.

The objective of this research is to develop a framework for the development and deployment of next-generation medical systems consisting of integrated and cooperating medical devices. The approach is to design and implement an open-source medical device coordination framework and a model-based component oriented programming methodology for the device coordination, supported by a formal framework for reasoning about device behaviors and clinical workflows. The intellectual merit of the project lies in the formal foundations of the framework that will enable rapid development, verification, and certification of medical systems and their device components, as well as the clinical scenarios they implement. The model-based approach will supply evidence for the regulatory approval process, while run-time monitoring components embedded into the system will enable "black box" recording capabilities for the forensic analysis of system failures. The open-source distribution of tools supporting the framework will enhance its adoption and technology transfer. A rigorous framework for integrating and coordinating multiple medical devices will enhance the implementation of complicated clinical scenarios and reduce medical errors in the cases that involve such scenarios. Furthermore, it will speed up and simplify the process of regulatory approval for coordination-enabled medical devices, while the formal reasoning framework will improve the confidence in the design process and in the approval decisions. Overall, the framework will help reduce costs and improve the quality of the health care.

The objective of this research is to develop a real-time operating system for a virtual humanoid avatar that will model human behaviors such as visual tracking and other sensori-motor tasks in natural environments. This approach has become possible to test because of the development of theoretical tools in inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) that allow the acquisition of reward functions from detailed measurements of human behavior, together with technical developments in virtual environments and behavioral monitoring that allow such measurements to be obtained. The central idea is that complex behaviors can be decomposed into sub-tasks that can be considered more or less independently. An embodied agent learns a policy for actions required by each sub-task, given the state information from sensori-motor measurements, in order to maximize total reward. The reward functions implied by human data can be computed and compared to those of an avatar model using the newly-developed IRL technique, constituting an exacting test of the system. The broadest impact of the project would provide a formal template for further investigations of human mental function. Modular RL models of human behavior would allow realistic humanoid avatars to be used in training for emergency situations, conversation, computer games, and classroom tutoring. Monitoring behavior in patients with diseases that exhibit unusual eye movements (e.g., Tourettes, Schizophrenia, ADHD) and unusual body movement patterns (e.g., Parkinsons), should lead to new diagnostic methods. In addition the regular use of the laboratory in undergraduate courses and outreach programs promotes diversity.

The goal of this project is to develop a novel cyber-physical system (CPS) for performing multimodal image-guided robot-assisted minimally invasive surgeries (MIS). The approach is based on: (1) novel quantitative analysis of multi-contrast data, (2) control that uses this information to maneuver conformable robotic manipulators, while adjusting on-the-fly scanning parameters to acquire additional information, and (3) human-information/machine-interfacing for comprehensive appreciation of the physical environment. The intellectual merit arises from the development of: (1) a CPS that relies on "real" and "real-time" data, minimizing parametric and abstracted assumptions, extracts and matures information from a dynamic physical system (patient and robot) by combining management of data collection (at the physical sensor site) and data analysis (at the cyber site), (2) "smart sensing", to control data acquisition based on disruptive or situation altering events, (3) control coordination by interlacing sensing, control and perception, and the incorporation of steerable tools. The societal impact arises from contributions to a leap in MIS: from "keyhole" visualization (i.e., laparoscopy) to in-situ real-time image guidance, thereby enabling a wider range of MIS. This will directly benefit patients and their families (faster recovery/reduced trauma). Economic impact arises from the cost-effectiveness of MIS to the health care system, faster patient return to the workplace, and technology commercialization. The project will integrate research and education, diversity and outreach, by enhancing current and introducing new research-intensive courses in Cyber-physical Systems, Medical Imaging and Medical Robotics, and dissemination via trans-institutional collaborations, a comprehensive web site, multimedia web-seminars, and distribution to high schools.

The objective of this research is to develop an intuitive user interface for functional electrical stimulation (FES), which uses surgically-implanted electrodes to stimulate muscles in spinal cord-injured (SCI) patients. The challenge is to enable high-level tetraplegic patients to regain the use of their own arm. The approach is to develop a multi-modal Bayesian user-intent decoder; use natural muscle synergies to generate appropriate low-dimensional muscle activation signals in a feedforward controller; develop a feedback controller to enhance the performance of the feedforward controller; and test the system with SCI patients on daily living tasks, such as reaching, grasping, and eating. The challenge problem of restoring arm use to SCI patients will lead to new design principles for cyber-physical systems interfacing neural and biological systems with engineered computation and electrical power systems. The tight integration of the proposed user interface and controller with the users own control system requires a deep understanding of biological design principles such as nested feedback loops at different time and length scales, noisy signals, parallel processing, and highly coupled neuromechanical systems. This work will lead to new technology that dramatically improves the lives of spinal cord-injured patients. These patients often have no cognitive impairment and have long life spans after injury. The goal is to enable these patients to eat, reach, and grasp nearby objects. These tasks are critical for independent living and quality of life. This work will also help train a new generation of students in human-machine interfaces at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels.

CPS: Small: Collaborative Research: Localization and System Services for SpatioTemporal Actions in Cyber-Physical Systems The objective of this research is to develop models, methods and tools for capturing and processing of events and actions in cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a manner that does not violate the underlying physics or computational logic. The project approach uses a novel notion of cyber-physical objects (CPO) to capture the mobility and localization of computation in cyber-physical systems using recent advances in geolocation and the Internet infrastructure and supports novel methods for spatiotemporal resource discovery. Project innovations include a model for computing spatiotemporal relationships among events of interests in the physical and logical parts of a CPS, and its use in a novel cyberspatial reference model. Using this model the project builds a framework for locating cyber-physical application services and an operating environment for these services. The project plan includes an experimental platform to demonstrate capabilities for building new OS services for CPS applications including collaborative control applications drawn from the intermodal transportation system. The project will enable design and analysis of societal scale applications such as the transportation and electrical power grid that also include a governance structure. It will directly contribute to educating an engineering talent pool by offering curricular training that range from degree programs in embedded systems to seminars and technology transfer opportunities coordinated through the CalIT2 institute at UCSD and the Institute for Sensing Systems (ISS) at OSU. The team will collaborate with the non-profit Milwaukee Institute to explore policies and mechanisms for enterprise governance systems.

The objective of this research is to understand mechanisms for generating natural movements of skeletal mechanisms driven by stochastically-controlled, biologically-inspired actuators. The approach is to verify the hypothesis that the variability associated with high redundancy and the stochastic nature of the actuation is key to generating natural movements. This project seeks to: (i) develop a method to model and characterize actuator array topologies; (ii) develop a method to analyze the force variability of stochastic actuator arrays; (iii) develop an analytical method to generate movements for a robot with multiple degrees of freedom by minimizing the effect of variability; and (iv) demonstrate the validity of the approach through the development of a robotic arm driven by multiple stochastic array actuators. With respect to intellectual merit, the study of inhomogeneous stochastic actuator network topologies inspired by neuromuscular systems could find the "missing links" that bridge the gap between biological natural movements and the ones in artificial systems. Potential results could impact other research areas, including robust computer networks, robust immune systems, and redundant muscle coordination. With respect to broader impacts, a new graduate-level course provides students in engineering and science with a comprehensive and multidisciplinary education in the underlying principles, cutting-edge applications, and societal impacts of biologically-inspired robotics. Outreach activities include an interactive educational program for K-12 students and a workshop for high-school students and their mentors on robot development. International collaboration with Tokyo University of Science, Japan, will be initiated.