This NSF grant supports the First PI Meeting and Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), held at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel, in Arlington, VA on Aug 10-12, 2010. The purpose of this meeting is to provide a forum for scientific interaction among a wide range of stakeholders in academia, industry and federal agencies; to review new developments in CPS foundations; to identify new, emerging applications; and to discuss technology gaps and barriers. The program of the meeting includes presentations from projects funded by NSF under the Cyber-Physical Systems program, government and industry panels, and topical discussion groups.

This award supports the first Summer School on Cyber-Physical Systems, held at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, June 22-25, 2009. NSF funds support outreach and enable the participation of US graduate students and early career faculty in this international event. Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are systems that rely on a tight integration of computation, communication, and controls, for their operation and interaction with the physical environment in which they are deployed. Such systems must be able to operate safely, dependably, securely, efficiently and in real-time, in potentially highly uncertain or unstructured environments. CPS are expected to have great technical, economic and societal impacts in the near future. The objective of the Georgia Tech Summer School on Cyber-Physical Systems is to establish a forum for intellectual exchange on CPS science and technology for researchers from industry and academia. The format of the Summer School is a five-day meeting, organized around the different aspects of Cyber Physical Systems. The topical areas covered include: formal methods, distributed embedded systems, networked control systems, embedded software, scheduling, platforms, and applications.

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.

This project aims to develop a computational framework and a physical platform for enabling dense networks of micro-robotic swarms for medical applications. The approach relies on a new stochastic framework for design and analysis of dense networks, as well as new fabrication and characterization methods for building and understanding bacteria propelled micro-robotic swarms. This project enhances the CPS science beyond passive networks of millimeter-scale bio-implantable devices with active networks of micro-robotic swarms that could be more effective in combating various critical diseases with minimal impact on the human body. Three major research objectives are proposed in this project: 1) Statistical physics inspired approach to the modeling and analysis of dense networks of swarms: The theory envisioned for characterizing the dynamics of dense networks of swarms aims at achieving ?beyond Turing? computation via dense networks, designing autonomous reliable communication protocols for dense networks, and estimating and controlling their performance; 2) Fabrication and steering of swarms of bacteria propelled swimming micro-robots: Large numbers of both chemotactic and magnetotactic bacteria integrated micro-robotic bodies will be fabricated using self-assembly and micro/nano-fabrication methods. Chemotaxis and magnetotaxis will be respectively used as passive and active steering mechanisms for navigating the swarms of micro-robots in small spaces to perform specified tasks; 3) Characterization of the behavior and control of bacteria propelled micro-robotic swarms: To validate and fine tune the proposed computational models, the motion and behavior of single and large numbers of bacteria propelled micro-robots will be characterized using optical and other microscopy methods. Intellectual Merit: The research breakthrough proposed herein consists of building a new physical platform for micro-robotic swarms by using attached bacteria as on-board actuators and chemotaxis and magnetotaxis as passive and active steering control methods, and developing a new computational dense network framework for designing and analyzing such stochastic micro-robotic swarms. The statistical computational framework to be developed in this study will improve understanding of swarming behavior and control of large numbers of bacteria propelled micro-robots. This framework offers an integrated approach towards CPS design that is meant to operate under uncertainty conditions, yet be able to succeed in performing a specified task through self-organization and collective behavior. This bottom-top approach is meant to improve the theoretical foundations of the current computational models of CPS. Broader Impacts: The resulting computational framework and the physical platform could be adapted to a wide range of different stochastic dense network systems ranging from migration of cancer cell populations or dynamics of virus populations to immune system support and modeling. The proposed swarms of bacteria integrated micro-robots have potential future applications in health-care for the diagnosis of diseases and targeted drug delivery inside the stagnant or low velocity fluids of the human body or the medical diagnosis inside lab-on-a-chip microfluidic devices. Such health-care applications could improve the welfare of our society. To foster learning and training of next generation CPS workforce, the PIs plan to emphasize a cross-disciplinary approach to teaching topics that are usually offered in disjoint tracks. The PIs will integrate the CPS research activities in this study into their newly developed courses, and they will also teach one of these courses jointly. As a joint international educational activity, a three-day Summer School will be held alternately in US and Europe every year on various CPS topics related to our project. This will help building a strong international CPS community and training US and European students in CPS topics. The PIs will present the research results of this project to children, K-12 students, K-12 teachers, IEEE and ACM student members, and college students inside and outside of USA through public lectures. This project and the Sloan Foundation will support underrepresented and minority graduate students in the project. Moreover, underrepresented minority undergraduate students will be trained through the CMU ICES summer outreach program called The SURE Thing and the NSF REU program.

This NSF award provides support for a CPS Virtual Organization. The National Science Foundation established the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) program with the vision of developing a scientific and engineering foundation for routinely building cyber-enabled engineered systems in which cyber capability is deeply embedded at all scales, yet which remain safe, secure, and dependable -- "systems you can bet your life on." The CPS challenge spans essentially every engineering domain. It requires the integration of knowledge and engineering principles across many computational and engineering research disciplines (computing, networking, control, human interaction, learning theory, as well as mechanical, chemical, biomedical, and other engineering disciplines) to develop a "new CPS system science." Achieving such an ambitious goal is challenging. The objective of the CPS "virtual organization" (CPS-VO) project is to actively build and support the multidisciplinary community needed to underpin this new research discipline and enable international and interagency collaboration on CPS. In support of the CPS-VO, Vanderbilt University will work with the community to develop strategies and mechanisms to: (i) facilitate and foster interaction and exchange among CPS researchers across a broad range of institutions, programs and disciplines, (ii) enable sharing of knowledge generated by CPS research with the broader engineering and scientific communities, sharing and integrating experimental tools, platforms and simulators among researchers and stakeholders, (iii) facilitate and foster collaboration and information exchange between CPS researchers and industry and (iv) facilitate international collaboration on CPS research.

In many important situations, analytically predicting the behavior of physical systems is not possible. For example, the three dimensional nature of physical systems makes it provably impossible to express closed-form analytical solutions for even the simplest systems. This has made experimentation the primary modality for designing new cyber-physical systems (CPS). Since physical prototyping and experiments are typically costly and hard to conduct, "virtual experiments" in the form of modeling and simulation can dramatically accelerate innovation in CPS. Unfortunately, major technical challenges often impede the effectiveness of modeling and simulation. This project develops foundations and tools for overcoming these challenges. The project focuses on robotics as an important, archetypical class of CPS, and consists of four key tasks: 1) Compiling and analyzing a benchmark suite for modeling and simulating robots, 2) Developing a meta-theory for relating cyber-physical models, as well as tools and a test bed for robot modeling and simulation, 3) Validating the research results of the project using two state-of-the-art robot platforms that incorporate novel control technologies and will require novel programming techniques to fully realize their potential 4) Developing course materials incorporating the project's research results and test bed. With the aim of accelerating innovation in a wide range of domains including stroke rehabilitation and prosthetic limbs, the project is developing new control concepts and modeling and simulation technologies for robotics. In addition to new mathematical foundations, models, and validation methods, the project will also develop software tools and systematic methods for using them. The project trains four doctoral students; develops a new course on modeling and simulation for cyber-physical systems that balances both control and programming concepts; and includes an outreach component to the public and to minority-serving K-12 programs.