Monitoring and control of cyber-physical systems.
The objective of this research is to develop new scientific and engineering principles, algorithms and models for the design of battery powered cyber-physical systems whose computational substrates include high-performance multiprocessor systems-on-chip. The approach is to design control tasks that guarantee performance and meet criteria for battery operation time. Task schedulers are co-designed to balance the computing load across the multiple processors, and to control the physical plant together with the control tasks. The controller and scheduler will be integrated with battery management algorithms through a systems theory approach so that the methods are provably correct with justfiable performance. Intellectual Merit: The program will create progress in digital and hybrid control theory that keeps up with the recent trend of using multiprocessor systems-on-chips for control and robotic applications. The mechanism for the migration of control tasks between multiple processors will respect physical and thermal performance. A novel battery dynamic discharge model is developed, which may be applied to context when the discharge current of batteries cannot be predicted by existing static battery models. Broader Impacts: Collaborations with industrial partners have been set up. The program offers multidisciplinary training in cyber-physical systems. A teaching and outreach lab is in place to host K-12 student teams that participate in robot competitions, and has become an Explorer Post for Boy Scout of America.
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GA Tech Research Corporation - GA Institute of Technology
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National Science Foundation
Zhang, Fumin
Fumin Zhang Submitted by Fumin Zhang on April 7th, 2011
The objective of this research is to develop technologies to improve the efficiency and safety of the road transportation infrastructure. The approach is to develop location-based vehicular services combining on-board automotive computers, in-car devices, mobile phones, and roadside monitoring/surveillance systems. The resulting vehicular Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) can reduce travel times with smart routing, save fuel and reduce carbon emissions by determining greener routes and commute times, improve safety by detecting road hazards, change driving behavior using smart tolling, and enable measurement-based insurance plans that incentivize good driving. This research develops distributed algorithms for predictive travel delay modeling, feedback-based routing, and road hazard assessment. It develops privacy-preserving protocols for capturing and analyzing data and using it for tasks such as congestion-aware tolling. It also develops a secure macro-tasking software run-time substrate to ensure that algorithms can be programmed centrally without explicitly programming each node separately, while ensuring that it is safe to run third-party code. The research focuses on re-usable methods that can benefit multiple vehicular services, and investigates which lessons learned from this vehicular CPS effort generalize to other situations. Road transportation is a grand challenge problem for modern society, which this research can help overcome. Automobile vendors, component developers, and municipal authorities have all shown interest in deployment. The education plan includes outreach to local K-12 students and a new undergraduate course on transportation from a CPS perspective, which will involve term projects using the data collected in the project
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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National Science Foundation
Samuel Madden
Daniela Rus
Balakrishnan, Hari
Hari Balakrishnan Submitted by Hari Balakrishnan on April 7th, 2011
The objective of this research is to enable operation of synthetic and cyborg insects in complicated environments, such as outdoors or in a collapsed building. As the mobile platforms and environment have significant uncertainty, learning and adaptation capabilities are critical. The approach consists of three main thrusts to enable the desired learning and adaptation: (i) Development of algorithms to efficiently learn optimal control policies and dynamics models through sharing the learning and adaptation between various instantiations of platforms and environments. (ii) Creation of control learning algorithms which can be run on low-cost, low-power mobile platforms. (iii) Development of algorithms for online improvement of policy performance in a minimal number of real-world trials. The proposed research will advance learning and adaptation capabilities of practical cyberphysical systems. The proposed approach will be generally applicable and lead to a new class of learning and adapting systems that are able to leverage shared properties between multiple tasks to significantly speed up learning and adaptation. Success in this research project will bring society closer to solving the grand challenge of teams of mobile, disposable, search and rescue robots which can robustly locomote through uncertain and novel environments, finding survivors in disaster situations, while removing risk from rescuers. This project will provide interdisciplinary training through research and classwork for undergraduate and graduate students in creating systems which intimately couple the cyber and physical aspects in robotic and living mobile platforms. Through the SUPERB summer program, under-represented students in engineering will experience research in learning and robotics.
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University of California-Berkeley
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National Science Foundation
Ronald Fearing
Michel Maharbiz
Abbeel, Pieter
Pieter Abbeel Submitted by Pieter Abbeel on April 7th, 2011
The objective of this research is to study the formal design and verification of advanced vehicle dynamics control systems. The approach is to consider the vehicle-driver-road system as a cyber-physical system (CPS) by focusing on three critical components: (i) the tire-road interaction; (ii) the driver-vehicle interaction; and (iii) the controller design and validation. Methods for quantifying and estimating the uncertainty of the road friction coefficient by using self-powered wireless sensors embedded in the tire are developed for considering tire-road interaction. Tools for real-time identification of nominal driver behavior and uncertainty bounds by using in-vehicle cameras and body wireless sensors are developed for considering driver-vehicle interaction. A predictive hybrid supervisory control scheme will guarantee that the vehicle performs safely for all possible uncertainty levels. In particular, for controller design and validation, the CPS autonomy level is continuously adapted as a function of human and environment conditions and their uncertainty bounds quantified by considering tire-road and driver-vehicle interaction. High confidence is critical in all human operated and supervised cyber-physical systems. These include environmental monitoring, telesurgery, power networks, and any transportation CPS. When human and environment uncertainty bounds can be predicted, safety can be robustly guaranteed by a proper controller design and validation. This avoids lengthy and expensive trial and error design procedures and drastically increases their confidence level. Graduate, undergraduate and underrepresented engineering students benefit from this project through classroom instruction, involvement in the research and substantial interaction with industrial partners from the fields of tires, vehicle active safety, and wireless sensors.
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University of California-Berkeley
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National Science Foundation
Borrelli, Francesco
Francesco Borrelli Submitted by Francesco Borrelli on April 7th, 2011
The objective of this research is to develop the scientific foundation for the quantitative analysis and design of control networks. Control networks are wireless substrates for industrial automation control, such as the WirelessHART and Honeywell's OneWireless, and have fundamental differences over their sensor network counterparts as they also include actuation and the physical dynamics. The approach of the project focuses on understanding cross-cutting interfaces between computing systems, control systems, sensor networks, and wireless communications using time-triggered architectures. The intellectual merit of this research is based on using time-triggered communication and computation as a unifying abstraction for understanding control networks. Time-triggered architectures enable the natural integration of communication, computation, and physical aspects of control networks as switched control systems. The time-triggered abstraction will serve for addressing the following interrelated themes: Optimal Schedules via Quantitative Automata, Quantitative Analysis and Design of Control Networks: Wireless Protocols for Optimal Control: Quantitative Trust Management for Control Networks. Various components of this research will be integrated into the PIs' RAVEN control network which is compatible with both WirelessHART and OneWireless specifications. This provides a direct path for this proposal to have immediate industrial impact. In order to increase the broader impact of this project, this project will launch the creation of a Masters' program in Embedded Systems, one of the first in the nation. The principle that guides the curriculum development of this novel program is a unified systems view of computing, communication, and control systems.
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University of Pennsylvania
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National Science Foundation
Alejandro Ribeiro
Pappas, George
George Pappas Submitted by George Pappas on April 7th, 2011
The objective of this research is to develop abstractions by which the controlled process and computation state in a cyber-physical system can both be expressed in a form that is useful for decision-making across real-time task scheduling and control actuation domains. The approach is to quantify the control degradation in terms of response time, thereby tying computer responsiveness to the controlled process performance and use such cost functions to effectively manage computational resources. Similarly, control strategies can be adjusted so as to be responsive to computational state. Unmanned aircraft will be used as vehicles to demonstrate our approach. The intellectual merit of this research is that it takes disparate fields, control and computation, and builds formal abstractions in both the computation-to-control and control-to-computation directions. These abstractions are grounded in terms of physical reality (e.g., time, fuel, energy) and encapsulate in a form comprehensible and meaningful to each domain, the relevant attributes of the other domain. This research is important because cyber-physical systems are playing an increasing role in all walks of life. It will allow design approaches to be systematic and efficient rather than ad hoc. It is based on a large body of our prior work that has begun to successfully bridge the representational and algorithmic gap that separates the control and computer science & engineering communities. Dissemination of results will be by means of courses in our universities, instructional materials, research and tutorial publications and industry collaboration (e.g., General Motors R&D). The plan is to hire minority/female students.
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University of Massachusetts Amherst
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National Science Foundation
Krishna, C.Mani
C.Mani  Krishna Submitted by C.Mani Krishna on April 7th, 2011
This proposed CPS project aims to enable intelligent telesurgery in which a surgeon, or a distributed team of surgeons, can work on tiny regions in the body with minimal access. The University of Washington will expand an existing open surgical robot testbed, and create a robust infrastructure for cyber-physical systems with which to extend traditional real-time control and teleoperation concepts by adding three new interfaces to the system: networking, intelligent robotics, and novel non-linear controllers. Intellectual Merit: This project aims to break new ground beyond teleoperation by adding advanced robotic functions. Equally robust and flexible networking, high-level interfaces, and novel controllers will be added to the existing sytsem. The resulting system will be an open architecture and a substrate upon which many cyber-physical system ideas and algorithms will be tested under realistic conditions. The platforms proven physical robustness will permit rigorous evaluation of results and the open interfaces will encourage collaboration and sharing of results. Broader Impacts: We expect the results to enable new research in multiple ways. First, the collaborators such as Johns Hopkins, U.C. Santa Cruz, and several foreign institutions will be able to remotely connect to new high level interfaces provided by this project. Second, for the first time a robust and completely open surgical telerobot will be available for research so that CPS researchers do not need to be limited to isolated toy problems but instead be able to prototype advanced surgical robotics techniques and evaluate them in realistic contexts including animal procedures.
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University of Washington
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National Science Foundation
Hannaford, Blake
Blake Hannaford Submitted by Blake Hannaford on April 7th, 2011
The objective of this research is to develop abstractions by which the controlled process and computation state in a cyber-physical system can both be expressed in a form that is useful for decision-making across real-time task scheduling and control actuation domains. The approach is to quantify the control degradation in terms of response time, thereby tying computer responsiveness to the controlled process performance and use such cost functions to effectively manage computational resources. Similarly, control strategies can be adjusted so as to be responsive to computational state. Unmanned aircraft will be used as vehicles to demonstrate our approach. The intellectual merit of this research is that it takes disparate fields, control and computation, and builds formal abstractions in both the computation-to-control and control-to-computation directions. These abstractions are grounded in terms of physical reality (e.g., time, fuel, energy) and encapsulate in a form comprehensible and meaningful to each domain, the relevant attributes of the other domain. This research is important because cyber-physical systems are playing an increasing role in all walks of life. It will allow design approaches to be systematic and efficient rather than ad hoc. It is based on a large body of our prior work that has begun to successfully bridge the representational and algorithmic gap that separates the control and computer science & engineering communities. Dissemination of results will be by means of courses in our universities, instructional materials, research and tutorial publications and industry collaboration (e.g., General Motors R&D). The plan is to hire minority/female students.
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University of Michigan Ann Arbor
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National Science Foundation
Shin, Kang
Kang Shin Submitted by Kang Shin on April 7th, 2011
The objective of this research is the development of novel control architectures and computationally efficient controller design algorithms for distributed cyber-physical systems with decentralized information infrastructures and limited communication capabilities. Active safety in Intelligent Transportation Systems will be the focus cyber-physical application. For the successful development and deployment of cooperative active safety systems, it is critical to develop theory and techniques to design algorithms with guaranteed safety properties and predictable behavior. The approach is to develop a new methodology for the design of communicating distributed hybrid controllers by integrating in a novel manner discrete-event controller design and hybrid controller design and optimization. The methodology to be developed will exploit problem decomposition and will have significant technological impact for a large class of cyber-physical systems that share features of modularity in system representation, partial information, and limited communication. The focus on distributed control strategies with limited communication among agents is addressing an important gap in existing control theories for cyber-physical systems. The approach will mitigate the computational limitations of existing approaches to control design for hybrid systems. Given the focus on cooperative active safety in Intelligent Transportation Systems, the results of this effort will have significant societal impact in terms of increased traffic safety and reduced number and severity of accidents. The broader impacts of this proposal also include involvement of high-school and undergraduate students and curriculum development by incorporating results of research into existing courses on cyber-physical systems.
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University of Michigan Ann Arbor
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National Science Foundation
Lafortune, Stephane
Stephane Lafortune Submitted by Stephane Lafortune on April 7th, 2011
George Pappas Submitted by George Pappas on July 1st, 2010
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