This CPS Frontiers project addresses highly dynamic Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), understood as systems where a computing delay of a few milliseconds or an incorrectly computed response to a disturbance can lead to catastrophic consequences. Such is the case of cars losing traction when cornering at high speed, unmanned air vehicles performing critical maneuvers such as landing, or disaster and rescue response bipedal robots rushing through the rubble to collect information or save human lives. The preceding examples currently share a common element: the design of their control software is made possible by extensive experience, laborious testing and fine tuning of parameters, and yet, the resulting closed-loop system has no formal guarantees of meeting specifications. The vision of the project is to provide a methodology that allows for complex and dynamic CPSs to meet real-world requirements in an efficient and robust way through the formal synthesis of control software. The research is developing a formal framework for correct-by-construction control software synthesis for highly dynamic CPSs with broad applications to automotive safety systems, prostheses, exoskeletons, aerospace systems, manufacturing, and legged robotics. The design methodology developed here will improve the competitiveness of segments of industry that require a tight integration between hardware and highly advanced control software such as: automotive (dynamic stability and control), aerospace (UAVs), medical (prosthetics, orthotics, and exoskeleton design) and robotics (legged locomotion). To enhance the impact of these efforts, the PIs are developing interdisciplinary teaching materials to be made freely available and disseminating their work to a broad audience.

This project aims to enable cyber-physical systems that can be worn on the body in order to one day allow their users to touch, feel, and manipulate computationally simulated three-dimensional objects or digital data in physically realistic ways, using the whole hand. It will do this by precisely measuring touch and movement-induced displacements of the skin in the hand, and by reproducing these signals interactively, via new technologies to be developed in the project. The resulting systems will offer the potential to impact a wide range of human activities that depend on touch and interaction with the hands. The project seeks to enable new applications for wearable cyber physical interfaces that may have broad applications in health care, manufacturing, consumer electronics, and entertainment. Although human interactive technologies have advanced greatly, current systems employ only a fraction of the sensorimotor capabilities of their users, greatly limiting applications and usability. The development of whole-hand haptic interfaces that allow their wearers to feel and manipulate digital content has been a longstanding goal of engineering research, but has remained far from reality. The reason can be traced to the difficulty of reproducing or even characterizing the complex, action-dependent stimuli that give rise to touch sensations during everyday activities. This project will pioneer new methods for imaging complex haptic stimuli, consisting of movement dependent skin strain and contact-induced surface waves propagating in skin, and for modeling the dependence of these signals on hand kinematics during grasping. It will use the resulting fundamental advances to catalyze the development of novel wearable CPS, in the form of whole-hand haptic interfaces. The latter will employ surface wave and skin strain feedback to supply haptic feedback to the hand during interaction with real and computational objects, enabling a range of new applications in VR. The project will be executed through research in three main research areas. In the first, it will utilize novel contact and non-contact techniques based on data acquired through on-body sensor arrays to measure whole-hand mechanical stimuli and grasping kinematics at high spatial and temporal resolution. In a second research area, it will undertake data-driven systems modeling and analysis of statistical contingencies between the kinematic and cutaneous sensed during everyday activities. In a third research area, it will engineer and perceptually evaluate novel cyber physical systems consisting of haptic interfaces for whole hand interaction. In order to further advance the applications of these systems in medicine, through a collaboration with the Drexel College of Medicine, the project will develop new methods for assessing clinical skills of palpation during medical examination, with the aim of improving the efficacy of what is often the first, most common, and best opportunity for diagnosis, using physician's own sense of touch.

The evolution of manufacturing systems from loose collections of cyber and physical components into true cyber-physical systems has expanded the opportunities for cyber-attacks against manufacturing. To ensure the continued production of high-quality parts in this new environment requires the development of novel security tools that transcend both the cyber and physical worlds. Potential cyber-attacks can cause undetectable changes in a manufacturing system that can adversely affect the product's design intent, performance, quality, or perceived quality. The result of this could be financially devastating by delaying a product's launch, ruining equipment, increasing warranty costs, or losing customer trust. More importantly, these attacks pose a risk to human safety, as operators and consumers could be using faulty equipment/products. New methods for detecting and diagnosing cyber-physical attacks will be studied and evaluated through our established industrial partners. The expected results of this project will contribute significantly in further securing our nation's manufacturing infrastructure. This project establishes a new vision for manufacturing cyber-security based upon modeling and understanding the correlation between cyber events that occur in a product/process development-cycle and the physical data generated during manufacturing. Specifically, the proposed research will take advantage of this correlation to characterize the relationships between cyber-attacks, process data, product quality observations, and side-channel impacts for the purpose of attack detection and diagnosis. These process characterizations will be coupled with new manufacturing specific cyber-attack taxonomies to provide a comprehensive understanding of attack surfaces for advanced manufacturing systems and their cyber-physical manifestations in manufacturing processes. This is a fundamental missing element in the manufacturing cyber-security body of knowledge. Finally, new forensic techniques, based on constraint optimization and machine learning, will be researched to differentiate process changes indicative of cyber-attacks from common variations in manufacturing due to inherent system variability.

This grant provides funding for establishing the scientific foundations of a product innovation process that can engage a vastly larger pool of talent to generate new ideas and to create new cyber-physical products. The primary objective is to address fundamental issues pertaining to natural interfaces, behavioral modeling and secure knowledge sharing, with particular emphasis on their integration. This objective will be achieved by pursuing the following three aims: (1) reducing barriers to participation in product innovation through natural interfaces between physical and virtual domains, (2) reducing barriers to model-based engineering in community-based product development, (3) overcoming information-related impediments to collaboration and information sharing. The findings will be embodied in a proof-of-concept cyber-physical platform for creative design and prototyping. The results of this research hold promise for a new conceptualization of a cyber-physical infrastructure, building on the developments in natural interfaces and information security. The specific outcomes include: (a) well-founded methods for 3D design support of cyber-physical products, and their software embodiment in a natural user interface, (b) techniques and middleware to support model-based engineering in virtual community-based product development, and (c) techniques and protocols for minimum disclosure interactions, quality of inputs assurance, provenance and integrity, and usage control for virtual design and making of cyber-physical products. The proposed research will advance the state of the art in shape creation, product design and manufacturing, and secure design coordination. Validation of the concepts in an educational context will benefit the engineering curriculum by exposing students to emerging ways of designing and making cyber-physical products. Over the long term, the research, education, and dissemination efforts conducted in this project will facilitate a paradigm shift where cyber-physical design and manufacturing using natural interfaces, secure behavioral modeling and knowledge sharing in communities will become a part of our nation?s creative design and manufacturing capacity.

This grant provides funding for the formulation of a data model, and trajectory planning platform and methodology to execute a fully digital 3D, 5-axis machining capability. Research will be performed on methods for utilizing multiple Graphical Processor Units (GPUs), which are readily available, parallel digital processing hardware, in these calculations. The methodology will be implemented in the context of an existing advanced computational framework that has tools for voxelization, variable resolution digital modeling, and parallel computing, integrating the fields of manufacturing and computer science. Experiments involving 5-axis machining will be executed to validate the methodology. Components will be machined and inspected on a coordinate measurement machine to verify that the target geometry has been achieved. If successful, this work will bring classical subtractive manufacturing back into the arsenal of rapid prototyping, providing users of typical CNC machine tools with the ability to rapidly determine if a part can be produced on a specific machine and machine the part. Having such a design and analysis tool will help to reduce the cost, improve the quality and allow rapid deployment of new innovations in components that require machining. This work will contribute to variable resolution digital representations to be employed in next generation digital manufacturing systems. It will also combine state-of-the-art concepts in computing and manufacturing to realize a completely new a cyber-physical approach to manufacturing.

This CPS Frontiers project addresses highly dynamic Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), understood as systems where a computing delay of a few milliseconds or an incorrectly computed response to a disturbance can lead to catastrophic consequences. Such is the case of cars losing traction when cornering at high speed, unmanned air vehicles performing critical maneuvers such as landing, or disaster and rescue response bipedal robots rushing through the rubble to collect information or save human lives. The preceding examples currently share a common element: the design of their control software is made possible by extensive experience, laborious testing and fine tuning of parameters, and yet, the resulting closed-loop system has no formal guarantees of meeting specifications. The vision of the project is to provide a methodology that allows for complex and dynamic CPSs to meet real-world requirements in an efficient and robust way through the formal synthesis of control software. The research is developing a formal framework for correct-by-construction control software synthesis for highly dynamic CPSs with broad applications to automotive safety systems, prostheses, exoskeletons, aerospace systems, manufacturing, and legged robotics. The design methodology developed here will improve the competitiveness of segments of industry that require a tight integration between hardware and highly advanced control software such as: automotive (dynamic stability and control), aerospace (UAVs), medical (prosthetics, orthotics, and exoskeleton design) and robotics (legged locomotion). To enhance the impact of these efforts, the PIs are developing interdisciplinary teaching materials to be made freely available and disseminating their work to a broad audience.

This CPS Frontiers project addresses highly dynamic Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), understood as systems where a computing delay of a few milliseconds or an incorrectly computed response to a disturbance can lead to catastrophic consequences. Such is the case of cars losing traction when cornering at high speed, unmanned air vehicles performing critical maneuvers such as landing, or disaster and rescue response bipedal robots rushing through the rubble to collect information or save human lives. The preceding examples currently share a common element: the design of their control software is made possible by extensive experience, laborious testing and fine tuning of parameters, and yet, the resulting closed-loop system has no formal guarantees of meeting specifications. The vision of the project is to provide a methodology that allows for complex and dynamic CPSs to meet real-world requirements in an efficient and robust way through the formal synthesis of control software. The research is developing a formal framework for correct-by-construction control software synthesis for highly dynamic CPSs with broad applications to automotive safety systems, prostheses, exoskeletons, aerospace systems, manufacturing, and legged robotics. The design methodology developed here will improve the competitiveness of segments of industry that require a tight integration between hardware and highly advanced control software such as: automotive (dynamic stability and control), aerospace (UAVs), medical (prosthetics, orthotics, and exoskeleton design) and robotics (legged locomotion). To enhance the impact of these efforts, the PIs are developing interdisciplinary teaching materials to be made freely available and disseminating their work to a broad audience. Continued on award #1562236: http://cps-vo.org/node/24060