This project will construct a wireless network of animal-borne embedded devices that will be deployed and tested in a biologically-relevant application. The networked devices will provide not only geo-location data, but also execute cooperative strategies that save battery-life by selectively recording bandwidth-intensive audio and high-definition video footage of occurrences of animal group behavior of interest, such as predation. This project comprises three concurrent and interdependent research themes. The first is the investigation of methods to design and analyze the performance of distributed algorithms that implement autonomous decisions at the mobile agents, subject to communication and computational constraints. The second will pursue data-driven fundamental research on the modeling of animal group motion and will promote a formal understanding of the mechanisms of social interaction. The third is centered on the investigation of methods for hardware integration to build distributed networks of embedded devices that are capable of executing the newly developed algorithms, subject to power and weight constraints. The results and experience gained in this project will guide the development of effective autonomous systems for the monitoring and protection of endangered species. This project will create undergraduate and graduate research opportunities at all participating institutions, expanding on an existing collaboration between the University of Maryland, Princeton University, and the National Geographic Society. There is the potential for using wide-reaching media resources to disseminate the results of this project to a broad audience. This may contribute to attracting more students to engineering and science.

The focus of this project is the efficient implementation of multiple control and non-control automotive applications in a distributed embedded system (DES) with a goal of developing safe, dependable, and secure Automotive CPS. DES are highly attractive due to the fact that they radically enhance the capabilities of the underlying system by linking a range of devices and sensors and allowing information to be processed in unprecedented ways. Deploying control and non-control applications on a modern DES, which uses advanced processor and communication technology, introduces a host of challenges in their analysis and synthesis, and leads to a large semantic gap between models and their implementation. This gap will be filled via the development of a novel CPS architecture by stitching together common fundamental principles of multimodality from real-time systems and related notions of switching in control theory and integrating them into a co-design of real-time platforms and adaptive controllers. This architecture will be validated at the Toyota Technical Center in the context of engine control and diagnostics. The results of this project will provide the science and technology for a foundation in any and all infrastructure systems ranging from finance and energy to telecommunication and transportation where distributed embedded systems are present. In addition to training the graduate and undergraduate students, and mentoring a post-doctoral associate who will gain multi-domain expertise in advanced control, real-time computation and communication, and performance analysis, an inter-school graduate and an integrated summer course will be developed on control in embedded systems and combined with on-going outreach programs at MIT and UPenn for minority and women undergraduate students and K-12 students.

Many practical barriers continue to exist for a blind individual who strives to lead an independent and active life, despite decades of development of assistive technologies. This project addresses the following two most prominent challenges: (1) disparity in information-sharing among people with visual impairment and its limited understanding by the research community; and (2) lack of methods and tools for effectively addressing the disparity. The central idea is to engage visually-impaired people and their families and friends to directly contribute to a joint endeavor of enhancing information flow, increasing awareness, and improving efficiency of assistive practices, through employing social media and participatory Web. The research is focused on designing computational methodologies and developing tools that are necessary for building cyber-physical systems for a domain where the tight intertwining of physical and cyber systems plus active participation of the human users are the key to attaining the otherwise unlikely capabilities for improving the quality of living for people with special needs. The key approach is to develop a blind-specific cyber-physical system that supports social-media-based crowdsourcing. This enables visually-impaired people to form loosely-connected groups, actively contribute their information and knowledge, and ask/answer unique questions of special needs. Such a system has specific features required: i) blind-friendly (both the cyber components and the physical components); ii) able to provide constantly-updated information, as opposed to just static websites); iii) able to support the users? real-time query for information when mobile iv) able to provide information that is important to the users? daily living, and v) supports expandability and scalability of the CPS, e.g., being able to bridge to other existing social network sites or to expand the virtual community. Specific approaches include automatic direction inquiry, instant call-in/text-in system, community-specific data mining, information retrieval and behavior modeling, all aiming at providing the most useful information for the target user. Aiming at bridging a significant knowledge gap in addressing the challenge of disparity in information-sharing for people with special needs in the age of social media, the project contributes to the development of a deeper understanding of the principles and methodologies in building new cyber-physical systems that promote and support active participation of users of the system, which is especially important for special-need groups such as the visually impaired, the elderly, etc. The significant impact of the work on the society lies in its potential in empowering special-need groups to pursue active and independent living in the information era. The work?s immediate impact on education is two-fold: supporting the visually-impaired students in independent learning and study as well as training students to work on emerging domains of tightly-intertwined cyber and physical systems.

This project will construct a wireless network of animal-borne embedded devices that will be deployed and tested in a biologically-relevant application. The networked devices will provide not only geo-location data, but also execute cooperative strategies that save battery-life by selectively recording bandwidth-intensive audio and high-definition video footage of occurrences of animal group behavior of interest, such as predation. This project comprises three concurrent and interdependent research themes. The first is the investigation of methods to design and analyze the performance of distributed algorithms that implement autonomous decisions at the mobile agents, subject to communication and computational constraints. The second will pursue data-driven fundamental research on the modeling of animal group motion and will promote a formal understanding of the mechanisms of social interaction. The third is centered on the investigation of methods for hardware integration to build distributed networks of embedded devices that are capable of executing the newly developed algorithms, subject to power and weight constraints. The results and experience gained in this project will guide the development of effective autonomous systems for the monitoring and protection of endangered species. This project will create undergraduate and graduate research opportunities at all participating institutions, expanding on an existing collaboration between the University of Maryland, Princeton University, and the National Geographic Society. There is the potential for using wide-reaching media resources to disseminate the results of this project to a broad audience. This may contribute to attracting more students to engineering and science.

This project will construct a wireless network of animal-borne embedded devices that will be deployed and tested in a biologically-relevant application. The networked devices will provide not only geo-location data, but also execute cooperative strategies that save battery-life by selectively recording bandwidth-intensive audio and high-definition video footage of occurrences of animal group behavior of interest, such as predation. This project comprises three concurrent and interdependent research themes. The first is the investigation of methods to design and analyze the performance of distributed algorithms that implement autonomous decisions at the mobile agents, subject to communication and computational constraints. The second will pursue data-driven fundamental research on the modeling of animal group motion and will promote a formal understanding of the mechanisms of social interaction. The third is centered on the investigation of methods for hardware integration to build distributed networks of embedded devices that are capable of executing the newly developed algorithms, subject to power and weight constraints. The results and experience gained in this project will guide the development of effective autonomous systems for the monitoring and protection of endangered species. This project will create undergraduate and graduate research opportunities at all participating institutions, expanding on an existing collaboration between the University of Maryland, Princeton University, and the National Geographic Society. There is the potential for using wide-reaching media resources to disseminate the results of this project to a broad audience. This may contribute to attracting more students to engineering and science.

A CPS is a system in which computer-based (cyber) technology is combined with all kinds of physical systems, such as planes and robotic-surgeons. CPSs require integration (in industry and academia) of different types of knowledge from many different domains. CPSs are built from often inaccurate, undependable components, and operate in harsh and unpredictable environments. The cyber domain, interfaces, and the physical domain are tightly interwoven and networked (distributed) and hence cannot be designed and optimized individually. The goal of this project is to create a general CPS design-science that makes the design of every CPS simpler, faster, and more dependable, while at the same time reducing the cost and the required expertise level. This project gives rise to a unified theory that can allow for specification, modeling, design, optimization, and verification of CPSs on different levels of design abstraction and different steps of projection, even across boundaries between varied technologies. The project does bridge the gap between the continuous-time physical domain and the discrete timed cyber system. This project has a broad and profound impact in scientific, engineering, industrial, and academic communities. By enabling a fundamentally efficient design of CPSs, the most limiting bottleneck in design technology is eliminated, paving the way for many new applications and jobs with significant economic and social impact. This project contributes to the on-line educational endeavors currently underway, allowing cross education in different disciplines of complex CPS and speeding up development of new CPS programs in engineering and computer science.

This project addresses the impact of the integration of renewable intermittent generation in a power grid. This includes the consideration of sophisticated sensing, communication, and actuation capabilities on the system's reliability, price volatility, and economic and environmental efficiency. Without careful crafting of its architecture, the future smart grid may suffer from a decrease in reliability. Volatility of prices may increase, and the source of high prices may be more difficult to identify because of undetectable strategic policies. This project addresses these challenges by relying on the following components: (a) the development of tractable cross-layer models; physical, cyber, and economic, that capture the fundamental tradeoffs between reliability, price volatility, and economic and environmental efficiency, (b) the development of computational tools for quantifying the value of information on decision making at various levels, (c) the development of tools for performing distributed robust control design at the distribution level in the presence of information constraints, (d) the development of dynamic economic models that can address the real-time impact of consumer's feedback on future electricity markets, and finally (e) the development of cross-layer design principles and metrics that address critical architectural issues of the future grid. This project promotes modernization of the grid by reducing the system-level barriers for integration of new technologies, including the integration of new renewable energy resources. Understanding fundamental limits of performance is indispensable to policymakers that are currently engaged in revamping the infrastructure of our energy system. It is critical that we ensure that the transition to a smarter electricity infrastructure does not jeopardize the reliability of our electricity supply twenty years down the road. The educational efforts and outreach activities will provide multidisciplinary training for students in engineering, economics, and mathematics, and will raise awareness about the exciting research challenges required to create a sustainable energy future.

The objective of this research is to develop a comprehensive theoretical and experimental cyber-physical framework to enable intelligent human-environment interaction capabilities by a synergistic combination of computer vision and robotics. Specifically, the approach is applied to examine individualized remote rehabilitation with an intelligent, articulated, and adjustable lower limb orthotic brace to manage Knee Osteoarthritis, where a visual-sensing/dynamical-systems perspective is adopted to: (1) track and record patient/device interactions with internet-enabled commercial-off-the-shelf computer-vision-devices; (2) abstract the interactions into parametric and composable low-dimensional manifold representations; (3) link to quantitative biomechanical assessment of the individual patients; (4) facilitate development of individualized user models and exercise regimen; and (5) aid the progressive parametric refinement of exercises and adjustment of bracing devices. This research and its results will enable us to understand underlying human neuro-musculo-skeletal and locomotion principles by merging notions of quantitative data acquisition, and lower-order modeling coupled with individualized feedback. Beyond efficient representation, the quantitative visual models offer the potential to capture fundamental underlying physical, physiological, and behavioral mechanisms grounded on biomechanical assessments, and thereby afford insights into the generative hypotheses of human actions. Knee osteoarthritis is an important public health issue, because of high costs associated with treatments. The ability to leverage a quantitative paradigm, both in terms of diagnosis and prescription, to improve mobility and reduce pain in patients would be a significant benefit. Moreover, the home-based rehabilitation setting offers not only immense flexibility, but also access to a significantly greater portion of the patient population. The project is also integrated with extensive educational and outreach activities to serve a variety of communities.

Robotic devices are excellent candidates for delivering repetitive and intensive practice that can restore functional use of the upper limbs, even years after a stroke. Rehabilitation of the wrist and hand in particular are critical for recovery of function, since hands are the primary interface with the world. However, robotic devices that focus on hand rehabilitation are limited due to excessive cost, complexity, or limited functionality. A design and control strategy for such devices that bridges this gap is critical. The goals of the research effort are to analyze the properties and role of passive dynamics, defined by joint stiffness and damping, in the human hand and wrist during grasping and manipulation, and then mimic such properties in a wrist-hand exoskeleton for stroke rehabilitation. The project will culminate with device testing in collaboration with rehabilitation clinicians. A significant problem in robotic rehabilitation is how to provide assisted movement to the multiple degrees of freedom of the hand in order to restore motor coordination and function, with a system that is practical for deployment in a clinical environment. Armed with a clearer understanding of the mechanisms underlying passive dynamics and control of systems exhibiting such behavior, this project will inform the design of more effective wrist/hand rehabilitation devices that are feasible for clinical use. In addition, the proposed project will create a unique interdisciplinary environment enabling education, training, and co-advising of graduate students, undergraduate research, and significant and targeted outreach activities to underrepresented groups in science and engineering.

This project develops a framework for design automation of cyber-physical systems to augment human interaction with complex systems that integrate across computational and physical environments. As a design driver, the project develops a Body/Brain Computer Interface (BBCI) for the population of functionally locked-in individuals, who are unable to interact with the physical world through movement and speech. The BBCI will enable communication with other humans through expressive language generation and interaction with the environment through robotic manipulators. Utilizing advances in system-level design, this project develops a holistic framework for design and implementation of heterogeneous human-in-the-loop cyber-physical systems composed of physically distributed, networked components. It will advance BBCI technology by incorporating context aware inference and learning of task-specific human intent estimation in applications involving semi-autonomous robotic actuators and an efficient wireless communication framework. The results of this project are expected to significantly speed up the design of complex cyber-physical systems. By accelerating the path from idea to prototype, this work shortens the time frame of and cost of development for assistive technology to improve the quality-of-life for functionally locked-in individuals. This project establishes an open prototyping platform and a design framework for rapid exploration of other novel human-in-the-loop applications. The open platform will foster undergraduate involvement in cyber-physical systems research, building confidence and expertise. In addition, new activities at the Museum of Science in Boston will engage visitors to experiment with systematic design principles in context of a brain computer interface application, while offering learning opportunities about basic brain functions.