Effective engineering of complex devices often depends critically on the ability to encapsulate responsibility for tasks into modular agents and ensure those agents communicate with one another in well-defined and easily observable ways. When such conditions are followed, it becomes possible to detect where problems lie so they can be corrected. It also becomes possible to optimize the agents and their communications to improve performance.

Cyber physical systems (CPSs) are merging into major mobile systems of our society, such as public transportation, supply chains, and taxi networks. Past researchers have accumulated significant knowledge for designing cyber physical systems, such as for military surveillance, infrastructure protection, scientific exploration, and smart environments, but primarily in relatively stationary settings, i.e., where spatial and mobility diversity is limited.

This project designs algorithms for the integration of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PEVs) into the power grid. Specifically, the project will formulate and solve optimization problems critical to various entities in the PEV ecosystem -- PEV owners, commercial charging station owners, aggregators, and distribution companies -- at the distribution / retail level.

Wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSAN) are systems consisting of numerous sensing and actuation devices that interact with the environment and coordinate their activities over a wireless communication network. This project studies "resilience" in WSANs. A resilient system is one that maintains an active awareness of surrounding threats and reacts to those threats in a manner that returns the system to operational normalcy in finite time. This project's approach to resilient WSANs rests on two fundamental trends.

This project explores balancing performance considerations and power consumption in cyber-physical systems, through algorithms that switch among different modes of operation (e.g., low-power/high-power, on/off, or mobile/static) in response to environmental conditions. The main theoretical contribution is a computational, hybrid optimal control framework that is connected to a number of relevant target applications where physical modeling, control design, and software architectures all constitute important components.

Autonomous navigation in unknown and dynamic environments has been a major challenge for synthetic mobile robotic agents. On the other hand, insects can easily solve such complex navigational problems and demonstrate remarkably stable and optimized locomotion skills in almost any environment. This project aims to develop a mobile sensor network where insects are used as mobile biological-robotic (biobotic) nodes.

The goal of this research is to develop a new framework to control teams of mobile robots, cooperating in a beamforming fashion, to transmit information between multiple source-destination pairs, while meeting quality-of-service constraints and consuming minimum power. The approach of this project ensures robust communications and longevity in challenging environments, arising during the transmission of high-rate data, such as video or images, or in environments where there is no line-of-sight.

Large-scale critical infrastructure systems, including energy and transportation networks, comprise millions of individual elements (human, software and hardware) whose actions may be inconsequential in isolation but profoundly important in aggregate. The focus of this project is on the coordination of these elements via ubiquitous sensing, communications, computation, and control, with an emphasis on the electric grid. The project integrates ideas from economics and behavioral science into frameworks grounded in control theory and power systems.

Effective engineering of complex devices often depends critically on the ability to encapsulate responsibility for tasks into modular agents and ensure those agents communicate with one another in well-defined and easily observable ways. When such conditions are followed, it becomes possible to detect where problems lie so they can be corrected. It also becomes possible to optimize the agents and their communications to improve performance.

This NSF Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Frontiers project "Foundations Of Resilient CybEr-physical Systems (FORCES)" focuses on the resilient design of large-scale networked CPS systems that directly interface with humans.