Assistive machines, like robot arms mounted on powered wheelchairs, promote independence and ability in those with severe motor impairments. Users of these assistive robots can teleoperate their devices to perform activities of daily living like eating and self care. However, as these machines become more capable, they often also become more complex. Traditional teleoperation interfaces cover only a portion of the control space, and it is necessary to switch between di erent control modes to access the full control space.

Overall Objective. The goal of this project is to facilitate the timely retrieval of dynamic situational awareness information from field deployed nodes by an operational center in disaster recovery or search and rescue missions, which are typically characterized by resource-constrained uncertain environments. Efficient situational awareness information retrieval under severe resource limitations is critical in applications like disaster response. Technology advances allow the deployment of field nodes capable of returning rich

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being increasingly deployed in critical infrastructures such as electric-power, water, transportation, and other networks. These deployments are facilitating real-time monitoring and closed-loop control by exploiting the advances in wireless sensor-actuator networks, the internet of “everything,” data-driven analytics, and machine-to-machine interfaces. CPS operations depend on the synergy of computational and physical components.

The project is to develop an Executable Medical Best Practice Guidance (EMBG) system to assist the adherence of acute patient care at a rural hospital to the best medical practice as if the patient care is at a regional hospital. The EMBG system is adaptive to the changing needs of a patient and physical resource availability, just as a GPS-enabled navigation system can driver’s preference and accommodate road condition changes.

The cities in the U.S. and elsewhere in the developed world are experiencing a transformation: Many people demand denser neighborhood with mixed use, while they choose to utilize public transportation, rather than private cars, for their commute and other daily transportation needs. To support this trend, cities are in need of novel transportation and logistics services that can help address the needs of their citizens, boost their productivity, and increase the wellness of their lives. There are a number of emerging technologies that can address this challenge.

Autonomy-enabled transportation networks are rapidly becoming a prominent Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) application area with tremendous potential for societal impact, as the autonomous systems technology penetrates into aerial/road vehicles and as the concept of connected vehicles emerge. The potential opportunities are not gone unnoticed. For example, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based delivery networks has already attracted innovative companies like Amazon, Google, and Matternet.

Designing software that can properly and safely interact with the physical world is an important cyber-physical systems design challenge. The proposed work includes the development of a novel approach to designing planning and control algorithms for high-performance cyber physical systems. The new approach was inspired by statistical mechanics and stochastic geometry. It will (i) identify behavior such as phase transitions in cyber-physical systems and (ii) capitalize this behavior in order to design practical algorithms with provable correctness and performance guarantees.

Parking can take up a significant amount of the trip costs (time and money) in urban travel. As such, it can considerably influence travelers' choices of modes, locations, and time of travel. The advent of smart sensors, wireless communications, social media and big data analytics offers a unique opportunity to tap parking's influence on travel to make the transportation system more efficient, cleaner, and more resilient. A cyber-physical social system for parking is proposed to realize parking's potential in achieving the above goals.

This project is a component of a larger effort is to develop the foundations of modeling, synthesis and development of verified medical device software and systems from verified closed-loop models of the device and organ(s). This research spans both implantable medical devices such as cardiac pacemakers and physiological control systems such as drug infusion pumps which have multiple networked medical systems. Here we focus on advancing two aspects of this work: (1) development of patient-specific models and therapies and (2) multi-scale modeling of complex physiological phenomena.

The CyberCardia project will lead to significant advances in the state of the art for system verification and cardiac therapies based on the use of formal methods and closed-loop control and verification.  The animating vision for the work is to enable the development of a true in silico design methodology for medical devices that can be used to speed the development of new devices and to provide greater assurance that their behavior matches designer intentions, and to pass regulatory muster more quickly so that they can be used on patients needing their care.