This project envisions a future desktop technology that prints actual programmable hybrid electro-mechanical devices from only their sketches on-demand, anywhere with the skill of a team of professional engineers using advanced materials. It would transform manufacturing as dramatically as the personal computer democratized information technology and transformed how we communicate. The capability to customize cyber-physical systems on-demand would change how contingencies are planned. Rescuers engaged in humanitarian aid and disaster reliefs in remote locations could minimize their logistic needs on-site. Warehouses of spare and replacement parts that may never be used could be replaced by storing only their designs digitally, not the physical parts themselves. Fundamental problems in computer science about what is computable by digital machines will change. The problems will be reframed in a larger context as what functional hybrid machines are constructible from cyber-physical primitives. The technical approach builds on analogies with compiler technology and supporting algorithmic theories. Experienced engineers may know from experience what is constructible but their experience must be expressed in a language that blends the continuous with the discrete, the cyber with the physics of materials processing. The project addresses broad classes of constructible cyber-physical systems: (1) the development of tools for functional specification and automated co-design of the mechanical, electrical, computing, and software aspects of the device; (2) the design of planning and control algorithms for the assembly of the device and for delivering the desired function of behavior, and tools for the analysis of these algorithms that take into account all the necessary resources, including actuators, sensors, and data streams from the world; (3) the methodology to generate device-specific and task-specific programming environments that provide safeguards for programs written by non-expert users to enable them to operate the machines safely; and (4) the development of novel approaches to the automated production of new devices which may be based on the synthesis of programmable materials with customizable electrical or mechanical properties. This research is highly multidisciplinary, primarily leveraging the disciplines of computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering, materials, and manufacturing science. This project will create a community of interest in this new research area, reach out to young people in grades K-12, engage the national and international community through professional society meetings, and establish new interdisciplinary programs among the participating academic institutions. Like the very successful MOSIS program (www.mosis.com/), this project will disseminate the research results and provide a community resource and service for experimentation with our technologies. ¬ For more information, please visit: http://ppm.csail.mit.edu

This project envisions a future desktop technology that prints actual programmable hybrid electro-mechanical devices from only their sketches on-demand, anywhere with the skill of a team of professional engineers using advanced materials. It would transform manufacturing as dramatically as the personal computer democratized information technology and transformed how we communicate. The capability to customize cyber-physical systems on-demand would change how contingencies are planned. Rescuers engaged in humanitarian aid and disaster reliefs in remote locations could minimize their logistic needs on-site. Warehouses of spare and replacement parts that may never be used could be replaced by storing only their designs digitally, not the physical parts themselves. Fundamental problems in computer science about what is computable by digital machines will change. The problems will be reframed in a larger context as what functional hybrid machines are constructible from cyber-physical primitives. The technical approach builds on analogies with compiler technology and supporting algorithmic theories. Experienced engineers may know from experience what is constructible but their experience must be expressed in a language that blends the continuous with the discrete, the cyber with the physics of materials processing. The project addresses broad classes of constructible cyber-physical systems: (1) the development of tools for functional specification and automated co-design of the mechanical, electrical, computing, and software aspects of the device; (2) the design of planning and control algorithms for the assembly of the device and for delivering the desired function of behavior, and tools for the analysis of these algorithms that take into account all the necessary resources, including actuators, sensors, and data streams from the world; (3) the methodology to generate device-specific and task-specific programming environments that provide safeguards for programs written by non-expert users to enable them to operate the machines safely; and (4) the development of novel approaches to the automated production of new devices which may be based on the synthesis of programmable materials with customizable electrical or mechanical properties. This research is highly multidisciplinary, primarily leveraging the disciplines of computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering, materials, and manufacturing science. This project will create a community of interest in this new research area, reach out to young people in grades K-12, engage the national and international community through professional society meetings, and establish new interdisciplinary programs among the participating academic institutions. Like the very successful MOSIS program (www.mosis.com/), this project will disseminate the research results and provide a community resource and service for experimentation with our technologies. ¬ For more information, please visit: http://ppm.csail.mit.edu

As more of the world's cities suffer from congestion, pollution, and energy exploitation, urban mobility remains one of the toughest challenges that cities face as the process of population growth and urbanization continues. So far, the most common approach for urban mobility characterization focuses on vehicle's spatial and temporal positions. However, urban mobility is a multidimensional characteristic of the city life, experienced as tangled layers of interconnected infrastructures and information networks around people and their needs in a spatio-emporal frame. As a result, the study of mobility should go beyond transportation systems, be customer-centered and merged into other physical systems and cyber networks. This Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project is motivated by the need to increase the situational awareness in urban mobility and distribute reliable and timely information to city managers and city residents about issues associated with urban mobility. Through successful collaboration, this project aims to develop a new definition of urban mobility with measurable indices to characterize the urban mobility paradigm around citizens integrating transportation networks, electricity networks, and crowdsourced data. This EAGER project is expected to contribute to the team's established and ongoing effort in the Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) in collaboration with the City of Tallahassee, Florida. The research team has completed the first phase of the GCTC, and this EAGER project will lay the foundation for the second phase by developing a data-driven approach to characterize urban mobility, which integrates collected data from the transportation network, electricity network, weather, air quality and social media within the City of Tallahassee. This approach will put the City of Tallahassee one step closer in their efforts towards being a "smart city" by improving the city services through measurable mobility benefits, and enhance the quality of life for residents. This approach will be supported by the active GCTC action cluster including Internet2, EDD Inc., and StanTec companies to support the Tallahassee GCTC efforts. The UHDNetCity will be able to bring measurable mobility benefits and improve Tallahassee resident's quality of life in terms of (1) lowering energy consumption by vehicles and infrastructure, (2) reducing congestion, crashes and traveler frustration, (3) improving safety and reliability, and (4) providing a more streamlined, efficient and cost-effective system to operate and maintain city service networks. The UHDNetCity framework combines data fusion, signal processing, and machine learning, to provide a unified mathematical foundation for real-time urban mobility sensing by processing heterogeneous spatio-temporal measurement data and network models. This mathematical framework will lead to bridging the gap between supervised, and semi-supervised machine learning algorithms for urban mobility characterization using hidden data structures in the heterogeneous urban data sources. The UHDNetCity employs a user-driven play-centric design approach to encourage resident's adoption of the urban crowdsourcing dashboards such as DigiTally mobile app developed by the City of Tallahassee and promotes their engagement in the urban mobility management.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners use strong magnetic fields to safely image soft tissues deep inside the body. They offer a unique tool for guiding therapies: images while patient is inside the scanner can localize diseased tissue and guide an intervention with high accuracy. This research controls MRI magnetic fields to wirelessly push millimeter-scale robots through vessels in the body, assemble them into tools, and provide targeted drug delivery or pierce tissue. This will directly impact healthcare, improving patient outcome by enabling unparalleled minimal invasiveness resulting in faster recovery, fewer side effects, and cost-effectiveness. This transformative toolset for multi-agent control will set the foundation for a wealth of medical therapies and surgical interventions. Using magnetic forces of clinical MRI scanners to steer miniature tetherless effectors through human bodies and combining with real-time imaging and operator immersion could transform the practice of minimally invasive interventions. This CPS will seamlessly integrate physical (scanner sensor/actuator, effectors, patient, operator) and cyber (world modeling, combined sensor and effector control, operator immersion). Work entails: (1) Portfolio of parametric effector designs that can be optimized to exploit the constraints of a given clinical procedure. (2) Toolbox of automatic controllers for MRI-based powering and steering of tetherless effectors in the body lumen, self-assembling them into tools, and precision therapy delivery or to pierce tissue. (3) Real-time MRI-based sensing of the physical world for imaging and tracking effectors and tissue. (4) Linked effector and MRI scanner control on-the-fly. (5) Visual/force-feedback human-robot interfacing. The work focuses on two effector classes: an MRI Gauss gun that stores magnetic potential energy released by a chain reaction when robots self-assemble, and an MRI pile-driver that converts kinetic energy from an enclosed sphere into impulses to tunnel into tissue. These approaches will be validated through analytical modeling, scaled hardware experiments, and experiments in clinical MRI scanners.

Human interaction with the physical world is increasingly mediated by autonomy, as planes assist pilots, robots assist surgeons, and cars assist drivers. Automation is introduced in such systems to aid humans and guarantee safety and performance. However, such guarantees are hard to provide, since humans may misunderstand the automation's intentions or behave in an unanticipated manner; tragic examples like the crash of Air France flight 447 illustrate that such confusion between pilots and autopilots can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Although some applications may someday yield to full automation (e.g., cars can already drive themselves in traffic), legal and ethical concerns related to safety, accountability, and non-repudiation will ensure humans and autonomy must be capable of handing off control authority at multiple levels in many such systems for the foreseeable future. The principal investigator (PI) proposes to flexibly deploy degrees of autonomy in the presence of human collaborators to compensate for changes in task or environmental conditions. Though PI focuses on robotic teleoperation for concreteness, the anticipated results will lead to general principles that benefit a variety of CPS with humans in-the-loop. Providing safety and performance guarantees for any system involving humans is a lofty goal. PI proposes to achieve this goal by (i) targeting our effort on applications in robotic teleoperation and (ii) integrating findings from multiple established academic disciplines, including engineering disciplines like human factors and control theory that consider the interaction between people and dynamic physical processes, as well as scientific disciplines like neuromechanical motor control and behavioral game theory that account for how humans interact individually and in groups. The proposed work paves the way for provably-safe teleoperated robots distributed in an urban area to provide services in transportation, manufacturing, telemedicine, and emergency response by developing principles for predictive modeling and automated interventions. Unlike the present day, where incompatibilities in aims or means for humans and autonomy lead to performance degradation ranging from significant to catastrophic, the proposed work envisions a future wherein humans can be safely deployed amidst cyber-physical systems in society with high confidence.