The goal of this project is to achieve coordination and localization among robots, even if some of the robots are behaving in an untrustworthy way. The approach is to use communication signals, and to control the motion of some robots, to learn about the environment and other agents in a way that provably supports coordinated behaviors. Multi-agent Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are poised for impact in society as self-driving cars, delivery drones, and disaster response robots. The results from this project will lead to improved mission intelligence for robotic platforms with significance across many areas: from Search and Rescue (SAR) tasks, to CubeSats and space exploration. The project includes tight integration between research tasks and educational activities, including participation in Hack for Humanity where students will explore SAR tasks.

The aim of this proposal is to enable people to control robots remotely using virtual reality. Using cameras mounted on the robot and a virtual reality headset, a person can see the environment around the robot. However, controlling the robot using existing technologies is hard: there is a time delay because it?s slow to send high quality video over the Internet. In addition, the fidelity of the image is worse than looking through human eyes, with a fixed and narrow view. This proposal will address these limitations by creating a new system which understands the geometry and appearance of the robot's environment. Instead of sending high-quality video over the Internet, this new system will only send a smaller amount of information about how the environment's geometry and appearance has changed over time. Further, understanding the geometry and appearance will let us expand the view visible to the person. Overall, these will improve a human's ability to remotely control the robot by increasing fidelity and responsiveness. We will demonstrate this technology on household tasks, on assembly tasks, and by manipulating small objects.

Most preK-12 school districts in the United States dedicate significant resources to safeguard against active shooters, e.g., school hardening, community planning, identification of suspicious behavior, crisis training for law enforcement, and training exercises for students, teachers, and all school personnel. However, when such an active-shooting event is in progress, only vague guidance is available to students and school personnel in the form of directives such as the "run-hide-fight" protocol. The Active Shooter Tracking and Evacuation Routing for Survival (ASTERS) project will complement these efforts by tracking a shooter in real time across multiple cameras and microphones, calculate the optimum evacuation path to safety for each student, teacher, and staff member, and communicate this information through a mobile app interface that is co-created in partnership with a connected community of students, parents, educators and administrators as well as school resource officers and school safety officers. ASTERS will incorporate multi-modal sensing, machine learning and signal processing techniques to accurately localize a gunman and weapons while preserving privacy of school community members. It will also use new computer vision and high-performance computing solutions to estimate crowd density and movement of people, and novel optimization and real-time simulation algorithms to predict ideal evacuation routes based on the building layout and predicted movement of the shooter. ASTERS will collaborate with schools to develop an annotated, multi-modal active shooter data set using a combination of digital simulation data and real-life practice drills. The research team will also partner with first-responders to ensure that ASTERS aligns with their needs.

The availability of vast amounts of operational and end-user data in cyber-physical systems implies that paradigm improvements in monitoring and control can be attained via learning by many artificial intelligence agents despite them possessing vastly different abilities. Engaging this heterogeneous agent base in the context of the smart grid requires the use of hierarchical markets, wherein end-users participate in downstream markets collectively through aggregators, who in turn are coordinated by an upstream market. The goal of this project is to conduct a systematic study of such market-mediated learning and control. This project aims at much deeper levels of participation from end-users contributing electricity generation such as rooftop solar, shedding load via demand response, and providing storage capabilities such as electric vehicle batteries, to transform into reliable distributed energy resources (DER) at the level of wholesale markets. A methodological theme is multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) by agents that control physical systems via actions at different levels of the hierarchy. Underlying the whole project are well-founded physical models of the transmission and distribution grids, which provide structure to the problem domain and concrete use cases. This project facilitates a deeper level of decarbonization in the electricity sector, and contributes to climate change solutions by engineering a flat, interactive grid architecture that allows significant DERs to provide electricity services to both local and regional grids. Engagement with a grid-level market operator enables the project to address a problem space of immediate relevance to the current electricity grid. The project also includes the development of educational materials on data-analytics and energy systems. Intrinsic to the program are efforts at outreach to involve high-school students via demonstrations and lectures based on the technology developed.

Across the country, dairy farmers are extremely vulnerable to a variety of factors, including cattle health and wellness. For example, when a cow is ill or stressed, she produces less milk. Subsequently, she might develop secondary conditions because she doesn't want to compete for food or water. For example, if a cow has separated herself from a herd, this may indicate that she is sick. Modern farmers already use a great deal of biometric information to monitor their animals, but social and psychological factors of cattle have not been well-studied. The purpose of the proposed project is to build a cyber-physical system that integrates the social interactions of dairy cattle with other biometric data, develop predictive models that use such data to perform early identification of sick or vulnerable cattle, and create algorithms to provide adaptive interventions to the cattle farmers. This project has the potential to lead to substantial impacts, both scientific and commercial. The decline of small farms is a well-known problem across the country, and anything that helps improve farmers? profit margins is valuable. This project will result in general guidelines about herd management- which could act as a ?tutorial? of sorts to new farmers- as well as technologies for individual herd management.
The proposed project will be one of the first to study the interaction networks of domestic cattle herds and attempt to tie those networks to biometric data and illness. On the sensing side, major contributions will include merging location/interaction data with other biometric data to detect social behaviors. On the analysis and action side, contributions will include connecting network behaviors of dairy cattle to their health and wellness, learning recommendation rules from farmers? responses on different cattle management scenarios through inductive logic programming, and designing explainable algorithms to provide recommendations for addressing health and wellness problems. Experimentation will be conducted using selected dairy farms in Northeast USA.

The goal of this project is to provide a scientific basis to understand and leverage the interaction among physical systems, artificial intelligence/cyber-human agents and their environment through the development of control synthesis tools to reason about safety and security under real-world uncertainties. Such cyber-physical systems, which include many vital infrastructures that sustain modern society (e.g., transportation systems, electric power distribution) are usually safety-critical. If compromised, serious harm to the controlled physical entities and the people operating or utilizing them as well as significant economic losses can result. However, model mismatches between the real system and an imperfect model of the system, in addition to other sources of uncertainties (e.g., measurement errors) disable existing safety and security protection, while robust solutions without learning may be overly conservative. These challenges demonstrate the need to design novel computational tools that can guarantee robust safety and security of cyber-physical systems under real-world uncertainties without sacrificing performance. The project includes research activities that are integrated with education and outreach to engage students and industry partners to appreciate the importance of safety and security for computing-related technologies.

This project will develop the theory and algorithmic tools for the design of provably-safe controllers that can leverage preview information from different sources. Many autonomous or semi-autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) are equipped with mechanisms that provide a window of projecting into the future. These mechanisms can be forward looking sensors like cameras (and corresponding perception algorithms), map information, forecast information, or more complicated predictive models of external agents learned from data. Through these mechanisms, at run-time, the systems have a preview of what lies ahead. Leveraging this information to improve performance of CPS while keeping strong guarantees on their safety, therefore, holds great promise for multiple technologies of national interest. We will use driver-assist systems in connected vehicles as the main application. Education and outreach activities will involve undergraduate and graduate students along with stakeholders from local automotive companies.

This activity is in response to NSF Dear Colleague Letter Supporting Transition of Research into Cities through the US ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations Cities) Smart Cities Partnership in collaboration with NSF and the US State Department. Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), an ASEAN city in Vietnam, is well-known for its traffic congestion and high density of vehicles, cars, buses, trucks, and a swarm of motorbikes (7.3 million motorbikes for more than 8.4 million residents) that overwhelm city streets. Large-scale development projects have exacerbated urban conditions, making traffic congestion more severe. Additionally, traffic congestion is one of the leading contributors to noise and dust pollution in the city. Altogether, traffic congestion poses major barriers to urban quality of life, but the solutions are complex. There are two main problems with traffic in HCMC. First, HCMC, like other dense urban areas, needs significant financial and technical resources to solve its traffic and infrastructure problems. Second, given that traffic monitoring is carried out by a limited number of staff who watch traffic activities from thousands of camera feeds on multiple screens, there are limits to the number and effectiveness of responses that personnel are able to offer in response to real-time traffic problems.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) make it clear that intelligent systems will account for the next leap in scientific progress to enable a myriad of future applications that improve the quality of life, contribute to the economy, and enhance societal resilience to a broad spectrum of disruptions. Yet, advances in AI come at a considerable resource costs. To reduce the cost of AI, this project takes inspiration from biological systems. It is well-known that a key bottleneck in AI is the perception subsystem. It is the part that allows AI to perceive and understand its surroundings. Humans are very good at understanding what's critical in their environment and the human perceptual system automatically focuses limited cognitive resources on those elements of the scene that matter most, saving a significant amount of ?brain processing power?. Current AI pipelines do not have a similar mechanism, resulting in significantly higher resource costs. The project refactors data analytics and machine intelligence pipelines to allow for better prioritization of external stimuli leveraging and significantly extending advances in scheduling previously developed in the real-time systems research community. The refactored AI pipeline will improve the efficiency and efficacy of AI-enabled systems, allowing them to be safer and more responsive, while at the same time significantly lowering their cost. If successful, the project will help bring machine intelligence solutions to the benefit of all society. This is achieved through interactions between research, education, and outreach, as well as integration of multiple scientific communities, including (i) researchers on embedded computing who offer platforms and schedulers, (ii) researchers on IoT and networking, and (iii) researchers on intelligent applications and application domain experts. The work is an example of cyber-physical computing research, where a new generation of digital algorithms learn to exploit a better understanding of physical systems in order to improve societal outcomes.

There is no question that indoor environments are often uncomfortable or unhealthy for occupants. This is an even more critical issue in healthcare facilities, where patients may experience the stressful effects of poor thermal, luminous, and acoustic environments more acutely. With complementary expertise from engineering and psychology, the proposed research is focused on creating a human-on-the-loop, responsive indoor environmental system with the potential to offer better quality of care in hospitals. The outputs of this project will have profound societal impacts on the wellbeing of both healthy individuals and on recovering sick individuals. Research outcomes will enable real time human-built environment interaction to minimize stress and optimize performance in any built environment, and ultimately lead towards economic benefits achieved through wellness and higher productivity. Improved indoor environmental quality in hospital settings will improve patient healing, which is an important societal benefit. Similar strategies can be used for educational facilities, and office buildings. This research encourages Broadening Participation through inclusion of individuals from underrepresented groups (female and Latinx Co-PIs), female and minority students, and a minority serving lead institution from an EPSCoR state. Results will be disseminated broadly through scientific publications and seminars, and K-12 outreach, including STEM competitions, and summer programs.