Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of ad-hoc, IP-based and Wifi networks for control of spatially-distributed physical systems, with applications including automotive fleets; swarms of UAVs; remote surgery; and optimization of sensor networks. These new forms of communication have dramatically decreased the cost, energy, and maintenance associated with remote regulation, but have added fundamental challenges in the form of delay, packet drops, and intermittent feedback.

The overall research objective of the project is to establish and demonstrate a generic motion- sensing co-design procedure that significantly reduces the complexity of mission design for swarm- ing CPS, and greatly facilitates the development of effective and efficient control and sensing strategies.

Electricity usage of buildings (including offices, malls and residential apartments) represents a significant portion of a nation's energy expenditure and carbon footprint. Buildings are estimated to consume 72% of the total electricity production in the US. Unfortunately, however, 30% of this energy consumption is wasted. Virtual energy assessment is an approach that can optimize building energy efficiency and minimize waste at a low cost with minimal expert intervention.

This project is focused on the fundamental research in establishing a foundational framework towards the development of an autonomous Cyber-Physical System (CPS) through distributed computation in a Networked Control Systems (NCS) paradigm. Specific attention is focused on an application where the computational, and communication challenges are unique due to the sheer dimensionality of the physical system. An example of such CPS is the smart power grid, which includes large-scale deployment of distributed and networked Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and wind energy resources.

Our overall aim in this project is to synthesize desired behaviors in populations of bacterial and mammalian cells. To this goal, we define the basis of a next-generation cyber-physical system (CPS) called biological CPS (bioCPS). The enabling technologies are synthetic biology and micron-scale mobile robotics. Synthetic genetic circuits for decision making and local communication among the cells are automatically synthesized using a Bio-Design Automation (BDA) workflow.

This research assesses the threat of cyber-physical attacks to manufacturing systems that change the design of a physical part, elude quality control measures, and result in part failure. This goal is achieved through the development of: a cyber-physical attack taxonomy, framework to assess levels of cyber-physical vulnerability, models to detect and diagnose the presence of attacks in real-time, and side-channel detection techniques specific to manufacturing.

This project aims at accelerating the deployment of security measures for cyber-physical systems (CPSs) by proposing a framework that combines anomaly identification approaches, which emphasizes on the development of decentralized cyber-attack monitoring and diagnostic-like components, with robust control countermeasure to improve reliability and maintain system functionality. One of the main challenges for cyber physical systems is the security of transmitted data over the communication network.

This project will design and implement a domain-specific language and compiler for microfluidic laboratory-on-a-chip (LoC) devices based on electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWoD) technology. The Lead PI’s team has designed and implemented BioScript, a domain-specific programming language for programmable microfluidics. The BioScript syntax is programmer friendly, with the intention of being accessible to biologists and other researchers and practitioners in the life sciences.