Part 1: Upper-limb motor impairments arise from a wide range of clinical conditions including amputations, spinal cord injury, or stroke. Addressing lost hand function, therefore, is a major focus of rehabilitation interventions; and research in robotic hands and hand exoskeletons aimed at restoring fine motor control functions gained significant speed recently. Integration of these robots with neural control mechanisms is also an ongoing research direction. We will develop prosthetic and wearable hands controlled via nested control that seamlessly blends neural control based on human brain activity and dynamic control based on sensors on robots. These Hand Augmentation using Nested Decision (HAND) systems will also provide rudimentary tactile feedback to the user. The HAND design framework will contribute to the assistive and augmentative robotics field. The resulting technology will improve the quality of life for individuals with lost limb function. The project will help train engineers skilled in addressing multidisciplinary challenges. Through outreach activities, STEM careers will be promoted at the K-12 level, individuals from underrepresented groups in engineering will be recruited to engage in this research project, which will contribute to the diversity of the STEM workforce. Part 2: The team previously introduced the concept of human-in-the-loop cyber-physical systems (HILCPS). Using the HILCPS hardware-software co-design and automatic synthesis infrastructure, we will develop prosthetic and wearable HAND systems that are robust to uncertainty in human intent inference from physiological signals. One challenge arises from the fact that the human and the cyber system jointly operate on the same physical element. Synthesis of networked real-time applications from algorithm design environments poses a framework challenge. These will be addressed by a tightly coupled optimal nested control strategy that relies on EEG-EMG-context fusion for human intent inference. Custom distributed embedded computational and robotic platforms will be built and iteratively refined. This work will enhance the HILCPS design framework, while simultaneously making novel contributions to body/brain interface technology and assistive/augmentative robot technology. Specifically we will (1) develop a theoretical EEG-EMG-context fusion framework for agile HILCPS application domains; (2) develop theory for and design novel control theoretic solutions to handle uncertainty, blend motion/force planning with high-level human intent and ambient intelligence to robustly execute daily manipulation activities; (3) further develop and refine the HILCPS domain-specific design framework to enable rapid deployment of HILCPS algorithms onto distributed embedded systems, empowering a new class of real-time algorithms that achieve distributed embedded sensing, analysis, and decision making; (4) develop new paradigms to replace, retrain or augment hand function via the prosthetic/wearable HAND by optimizing performance on a subject-by-subject basis.

Recent progress in autonomous and connected vehicle technologies coupled with Federal and State initiatives to facilitate their widespread use provide significant opportunities in enhancing mobility and safety for highway transportation. This project develops signalized intersection control strategies and other enabling sensor mechanisms for jointly optimizing vehicle trajectories and signal control by taking advantage of existing advanced technologies (connected vehicles and vehicle to infrastructure communications, sensors, autonomous vehicle technologies, etc.) Traffic signal control is a critical component of the existing transportation infrastructure and it has a significant impact on transportation system efficiency, as well as energy consumption and environmental impacts. In addition to advanced vehicle technologies, the strategies developed consider the presence of conventional vehicles in the traffic stream to facilitate transition to these new strategies in a mixed vehicle environment. The project also develops and uses simulation tools to evaluate these strategies as well as to provide tools that can be used in practice to consider the impacts of automated and connected vehicles in arterial networks. The project involves two industry partners (ISS and Econolite) to help facilitate new product development in anticipation of increased market penetration of connected and autonomous vehicles. The approach will be tested through simulation at University of Florida, through field tests at the Turner Fairbank Highway Research Center (TFHRC) and through the control algorithms that also will be deployed and tested in the field. The project will support multiple graduate students and will support creation of on-line classes. The project is at the intersection of several different disciplines (optimization, sensors, automated vehicles, transportation engineering) required to produce a real-time engineered system that depends on the seamless integration of several components: sensor functionality, connected and autonomous vehicle information communication, signal control optimization strategy, missing and erroneous information, etc. The project develops and implements optimization processes and strategies considering a seamless fusion of multiple data sources, as well as a mixed vehicle stream (autonomous, connected, and conventional vehicles) under real-world conditions of uncertain and missing data. Since trajectories for connected and conventional vehicles cannot be optimized or guaranteed, the project examines the impacts of the presence of automated vehicles on the following vehicles in a queue. The project also integrates advanced sensing technology needed to control a mixed vehicle stream, as well as address malfunctioning communications in connected and autonomous vehicles.

Today's automobiles are increasingly autonomous. The latest Mercedes S-class sedan applies corrective action when its driver strays out of lane or tailgates too closely. Semi-autonomy will soon yield to full autonomy. Nissan has promised a line of self-driving cars by 2020. Maritime craft are likewise moving from rudimentary autopilots to full autonomy, and autonomous aerial vehicles will doubtless play a significant role in the future economy. Current versions of these vehicles are cocooned in an array of sensors, but neither the sensors nor the timing, navigation, and collision avoidance algorithms they feed have been designed for security against malicious attacks. Radar and acoustic sensors transmit predictable, uncoded signals; vehicle-to-vehicle communication protocols are either unauthenticated or critically dependent on insecure civil GPS signals (or both); and vehicle state estimators are designed for robustness but not security. These vulnerabilities are not merely conceptual: GPS spoofing attacks have been demonstrated against a drone and an ocean vessel, causing the drone to crash and the vessel to veer off course; likewise, it appears possible to cause road accidents by fooling a car's radar sensor into thinking a crash is imminent, thus triggering automatic braking. This proposal seeks funding to fix these vulnerabilities by developing sensors and high-level decision-making algorithms that are hardened against such so-called field attacks. The goal of secure control systems is to survive and operate safely despite sensor measurements or control commands being compromised. This proposal focuses on an emergent category of cyber-physical attack that has seen little scrutiny in the secure control literature. Like cyber attacks, these attacks are hard to detect and can be executed from a distance, but unlike cyber attacks, they are effective even against control systems whose software, data, and communications networks are secure, and so can be considered a more menacing long-term threat. These are attacks on the physical fields such as electromagnetic, magnetic, acoustic, etc. measured by system sensors. As specialized sensor attacks, field attacks seek to compromise a system's perception of reality non-invasively from without, not from within. We emphasize field attacks against navigation, collision avoidance, and synchronization sensors, as these are of special importance to the rise of autonomous vehicles and the smart grid. This proposal's goal is to develop a coherent analytical foundation for secure perception in the presence of field attacks and to develop a suite of algorithms and tools to detect such attacks. A key insight behind this proposal's approach is that the physics of field attacks impose fundamental difficulties on the attacker that can be exploited and magnified to enable attack detection. This work will progressively build security into navigation, collision avoidance, and timing perception from the physical sensory layer to the top-level state estimation algorithms. The outcome of this work will be smarter, more skeptical sensor systems for autonomous vehicles and other autonomous systems.

The automotive industry finds itself at a cross-roads. Current advances in MEMS sensor technology, the emergence of embedded control software, the rapid progress in computer technology, digital image processing, machine learning and control algorithms, along with an ever increasing investment in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technologies, are about to revolutionize the way we use vehicles and commute in everyday life. Automotive active safety systems, in particular, have been used with enormous success in the past 50 years and have helped keep traffic accidents in check. Still, more than 30,000 deaths and 2,000,000 injuries occur each year in the US alone, and many more worldwide. The impact of traffic accidents on the economy is estimated to be as high as $300B/yr in the US alone. Further improvement in terms of driving safety (and comfort) necessitates that the next generation of active safety systems are more proactive (as opposed to reactive) and can comprehend and interpret driver intent. Future active safety systems will have to account for the diversity of drivers' skills, the behavior of drivers in traffic, and the overall traffic conditions. This research aims at improving the current capabilities of automotive active safety control systems (ASCS) by taking into account the interactions between the driver, the vehicle, the ASCS and the environment. Beyond solving a fundamental problem in automotive industry, this research will have ramifications in other cyber-physical domains, where humans manually control vehicles or equipment including: flying, operation of heavy machinery, mining, tele-robotics, and robotic medicine. Making autonomous/automated systems that feel and behave "naturally" to human operators is not always easy. As these systems and machines participate more in everyday interactions with humans, the need to make them operate in a predictable manner is more urgent than ever. To achieve the goals of the proposed research, this project will use the estimation of the driver's cognitive state to adapt the ASCS accordingly, in order to achieve a seamless operation with the driver. Specifically, new methodologies will be developed to infer long-term and short-term behavior of drivers via the use of Bayesian networks and neuromorphic algorithms to estimate the driver's skills and current state of attention from eye movement data, together with dynamic motion cues obtained from steering and pedal inputs. This information will be injected into the ASCS operation in order to enhance its performance by taking advantage of recent results from the theory of adaptive and real-time, model-predictive optimal control. The correct level of autonomy and workload distribution between the driver and ASCS will ensure that no conflicts arise between the driver and the control system, and the safety and passenger comfort are not compromised. A comprehensive plan will be used to test and validate the developed theory by collecting measurements from several human subjects while operating a virtual reality-driving simulator.

As information technology has transformed physical systems such as the power grid, the interface between these systems and their human users has become both richer and much more complex. For example, from the perspective of an electricity consumer, a whole host of devices and technologies are transforming how they interact with the grid: demand response programs; electric vehicles; "smart" thermostats and appliances; etc. These novel technologies are also forcing us to rethink how the grid interacts with its users, because critical objectives such as stability and robustness require effective integration among the many diverse users in the grid. This project studies the complex interweaving of humans and physical systems. Traditionally, a separation principle has been used to isolate humans from physical systems. This principle requires users to have preferences that are well-defined, stable, and quickly discoverable. These assumptions are increasingly violated in practice: users' preferences are often not well-defined; unstable over time; and take time to discover. Our project articulates a new framework for interactions between physical systems and their users, where users' preferences must be repeatedly learned over time while the system continually operates with respect to imperfect preference information. We focus on the area of power systems. Our project has three main thrusts. First, user models are rethought to reflect the fact this new dynamic view of user preferences, where even the users are learning over time. The second thrust focuses on developing a new system model that learns about users, since we cannot understand users in a "single-shot"; rather, repeated interaction with the user is required. We then focus on the integration of these two new models. How do we control and operate a physical system, in the presence of the interacting "learning loops", while mediating between many competing users? We apply ideas from mean field games and optimal power flow to capture, analyze, and transform the interaction between the system and the ongoing preference discovery process. Our methods will yield guidance for market design in power systems where user preferences are constantly evolving. If successful, our project will usher in a fundamental change in interfacing physical systems and users. For example, in the power grid, our project directly impacts how utilities design demand response programs; how smart devices learn from users; and how the smart grid operates. In support of this goal, the PIs intend to develop avenues for knowledge transfer through interactions with industry. The PIs will also change their education programs to reflect a greater entanglement between physical systems and users.

The electric power grid experiences disturbances all the time that are routinely controlled, managed, or eliminated by system protection measures- designed by careful engineering studies and fine-tuned by condensing years of operational experience. Despite this, the grid sometimes experiences disruptive events that can quickly, and somewhat unstoppably catapult the system towards a blackout. Arresting such blackouts has remained elusive - mainly because relays (protection devices) operate on local data, and are prone to hidden faults that are impossible to detect until they manifest, resulting in misoperations that have sometime been precipitators or contributors to blackouts. Inspired by the Presidential policy directive on resilience -- meaning the ability to anticipate, prepare, withstand, and recover from disruptive events, this project proposes "WARP: Wide Area assisted Resilient Protection", a paradigm that adds a layer of finer (supervisory) intelligence to supplement conventional protection wisdom - which we call resilient protection. Exploiting high fidelity measurements and computation to calculate and analyze energy function components of power systems to identify disturbances, WARP would allow relays to be supervised - correct operations would be corroborated, and misoperations will be remedied by judiciously reversing the relay operation in a rational time-frame. The project also envisions predicting instability using advanced estimation techniques, thus being proactive. This will provide power grid the ability to auto-correct and bounce back from misoperations, curtailing the size, scale and progression of blackouts and improving the robustness and resilience of the electric grid -- our nation's most critical infrastructure. In WARP, disruptive events are deciphered by using synchrophasor data, energy functions, and dynamic state information via particle filtering. The information is fused to provide a global data set and intelligence signal that supervises relays, and also to predict system stability. Resilience is achieved when the supervisory signal rectifies the misoperation of relays, or endorses their action when valid. This endows relays with post-event-auto-correct abilities 
- a feature that never been explored/understood in the protection-stability nexus. Architectures to study the effect of latency and bad data are proposed. WARP introduces new notions: global detectability and distinguishability for power system events, stability prediction based on
the sensitivity of the energy function components and uses a novel factorization method: (CUR) preserving data interpretability to reduce data dimensionality. All the proposed
tools will be wrapped into a simulation framework to assess scalability and accuracy-runtime tradeoffs, and quantify the degree of resilience achieved. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme during extreme events will be measured by reenacting two well-documented blackout sequences. In addition, simulations on benchmarked systems will be performed to assess scalability and accuracy-runtime tradeoffs, and quantify the degree of resilience achieved.

This project addresses urgent challenges in high confidence validation and verification of automotive vehicles due to on-going and anticipated introduction of advanced, connected and autonomous vehicles into mass production. Since such vehicles operate across both physical and cyber domains, faults can occur in traditional physical components, in cyber components (i.e., algorithms, processors, networks, etc.), or in both. Thus, advanced vehicles need to be tested for both physical and cyber-related fault conditions. The goal of this project is to develop theory, methods, and novel tools for generating and optimizing test trajectories and data inputs that can uncover both physical and cyber faults of future automotive vehicles. The level of vehicle reliability and safety achieved for current vehicles is remarkable considering their mass production, low cost, and wide range of operating conditions. If successful, the research advances made in this project will enable achieving similar levels of reliability and safety for future vehicles relying on advanced driver assistance technologies, connectivity and autonomy. The project will advance the field of cyber-physical systems, in general, and their lifecycle management, in particular. The validation and verification theory and methodology for cyberphysical systems will be expanded for uncovering anomalies and faults, especially using comprehensive case-based and optimization-based techniques for test scenario generation. The theoretical advances and case studies will contribute to the state-of-the-art in optimal control theory, game theory, information theory, data collection and processing, autonomous and connected vehicles, and automotive control. Sampling-based vehicle data acquisition and vehicle-aware data management strategies will be developed which can be applied more broadly, e.g., to cloud-based vehicle prognostics / conditional maintenance and mobile health-monitoring devices. Finally, approaches for efficient on-board data collection and aggregation will be implemented in a Cyber-physical system (CPS) Black Box prototype. The development of a vehicle-aware data management system (VDMS) will be pursued, leading to optimized use of data mining and compression inside the CPS Black Box to aggressively reduce the communication and computational costs. Synergistically with theoretical and methodological advances, automotive case studies will be undertaken with both realistic simulations and real experiments in collaboration with an industrial partner (AVL).

Errors in cyber-physical systems can lead to disastrous consequences. Classic examples date back to the Therac-25 radiation incidents in 1987 and the Ariane 5 rocket crash in 1996. More recently, Toyota's unintended acceleration bug was caused by software errors, and certain cars were found vulnerable to attacks that can take over key parts of the control software, allowing attackers to even disable the brakes remotely. Pacemakers have also been found vulnerable to attacks that can cause deadly consequences for the patient. To reduce the chances of such errors happening, this project investigates the application of a technique called Foundational Verification to cyber-physical systems. In Foundational Verification, the system being developed is proved correct, in full formal detail, using a proof assistant. The main intellectual merit of the proposal is the attainment of previously unattainable levels of safety for cyber-physical systems because proofs in Foundational Verification are carried out in complete detail. To ensure that the techniques in this project are practical, they are evaluated within the context of a real flying quadcopter. The project's broader significance and importance is the improved correctness, safety and security of cyber-physical systems. In particular, this project lays the foundation for ushering in a new level of formal correctness for cyber-physical systems. Although the initial work focuses on quadcopters, the concepts, ideas, and research contributions have the potential for transformative impact on other kinds of systems, including power-grid software, cars, avionics and medical devices (from pacemakers and insulin pumps to defibrillators and radiation machines).

Computation is everywhere. Greeting cards have processors that play songs. Fireworks have processors for precisely timing their detonation. Computers are in engines, monitoring combustion and performance. They are in our homes, hospitals, offices, ovens, planes, trains, and automobiles. These computers, when networked, will form the Internet of Things (IoT). The resulting applications and services have the potential to be even more transformative than the World Wide Web. The security implications are enormous. Internet threats today steal credit cards. Internet threats tomorrow will disable home security systems, flood fields, and disrupt hospitals. The root problem is that these applications consist of software on tiny low-power devices and cloud servers, have difficult networking, and collect sensitive data that deserves strong cryptography, but usually written by developers who have expertise in none of these areas. The goal of the research is to make it possible for two developers to build a complete, secure, Internet of Things applications in three months. The research focuses on four important principles. The first is "distributed model view controller." A developer writes an application as a distributed pipeline of model-view-controller systems. A model specifies what data the application generates and stores, while a new abstraction called a transform specifies how data moves from one model to another. The second is "embedded-gateway-cloud." A common architecture dominates Internet of Things applications. Embedded devices communicate with a gateway over low-power wireless. The gateway processes data and communicates with cloud systems in the broader Internet. Focusing distributed model view controller on this dominant architecture constrains the problem sufficiently to make problems, such as system security, tractable. The third is "end-to-end security." Data emerges encrypted from embedded devices and can only be decrypted by end user applications. Servers can compute on encrypted data, and many parties can collaboratively compute results without learning the input. Analysis of the data processing pipeline allows the system and runtime to assert and verify security properties of the whole application. The final principle is "software-defined hardware." Because designing new embedded device hardware is time consuming, developers rely on general, overkill solutions and ignore the resulting security implications. The data processing pipeline can be compiled into a prototype hardware design and supporting software as well as test cases, diagnostics, and a debugging methodology for a developer to bring up the new device. These principles are grounded in Ravel, a software framework that the team collaborates on, jointly contributes to, and integrates into their courses and curricula on cyberphysical systems.

Production as a service (PaaS) defines a new paradigm in manufacturing that will allow designers of new products to query existing manufacturing facilities and receive information about fabrication capabilities and production availability. The access to information such as part cost, part quality, and production time will help new products to be prototyped and scaled-up quickly, while also allowing existing manufacturing facilities to benefit from underutilized equipment and labor. The PaaS framework will include both a front-end query interface for the users and a back-end analysis component. The interface will be designed to connect users with small-, mid-, and large-sized manufacturing facilities, while the scheduling and routing algorithms will provide the flexibility and security protocols needed to guarantee operational and production safety across the range of facilities. Manufacturers that utilize the PaaS framework will reap the potential of meeting customer needs in terms of cost, quality, on-time delivery, while being reactive to changing market forces. With 12 percent of the GDP represented by the manufacturing industry, the manufacturing operational improvements that will result from this EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project have the potential to make a significant impact in the national bottom line. The aim of the PaaS platform is to enable distributed manufacturing plant locations to efficiently coordinate both within one plant location as well as across plant locations to realize a flexible service interface for supporting production management. The intellectual merit of this research lies in the extensions that will be created to the existing science and technology in service-oriented architectures to enable distributed production, while preserving proprietary information of the manufacturing systems. The key software abstraction that enables this innovation comes from the extension to the well-known APIs to capture the sophisticated query logic and diverse production requirements to meet user needs. Routing and scheduling decisions will be optimized by leveraging a global view of the current state of all of the components in the manufacturing facilities. To demonstrate scalability and ensure privacy guarantees across multiple facilities, hierarchical abstraction will be used to hide low-level details and proprietary information. The PaaS framework will transform the way manufacturing companies interact with the emerging high-value market; providing the architecture to drive innovation and enable small-, mid-, and large-scale manufacturing companies across the U.S. to compete for new product business on an even playing field.