Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of ad-hoc, IP-based and Wifi networks for control of spatially-distributed physical systems, with applications including automotive fleets; swarms of UAVs; remote surgery; and optimization of sensor networks. These new forms of communication have dramatically decreased the cost, energy, and maintenance associated with remote regulation, but have added fundamental challenges in the form of delay, packet drops, and intermittent feedback.

The overall research objective of the project is to establish and demonstrate a generic motion- sensing co-design procedure that significantly reduces the complexity of mission design for swarm- ing CPS, and greatly facilitates the development of effective and efficient control and sensing strategies.

Electricity usage of buildings (including offices, malls and residential apartments) represents a significant portion of a nation's energy expenditure and carbon footprint. Buildings are estimated to consume 72% of the total electricity production in the US. Unfortunately, however, 30% of this energy consumption is wasted. Virtual energy assessment is an approach that can optimize building energy efficiency and minimize waste at a low cost with minimal expert intervention.

The goal of this research project is to develop a scalable cyber-physical system (CPS) framework for the integration of physical and computational systems for bridge lifecycle monitoring. Bridge monitoring involves several independent but isolated components. Sharing of information and software modules across different systems is limited. Information sharing and system integration would facilitate meaningful use of data, thereby enhancing bridge operation and maintenance and public safety.

This project is focused on the fundamental research in establishing a foundational framework towards the development of an autonomous Cyber-Physical System (CPS) through distributed computation in a Networked Control Systems (NCS) paradigm. Specific attention is focused on an application where the computational, and communication challenges are unique due to the sheer dimensionality of the physical system. An example of such CPS is the smart power grid, which includes large-scale deployment of distributed and networked Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and wind energy resources.

This project features conception, design, and deployment of a wireless network of embedded devices, for monitoring the behavior of animals in the wild.  The system is being deployed and tested in biologically relevant scenarios.

Like today’s autonomous vehicle prototypes, vehicles in the future will have rich sensors to map and identify objects in the environment. For example, many autonomous vehicle prototypes today come with line­of­sight depth perception sensors like 3D cameras. These 3D sensors are used for improving vehicular safety in autonomous driving, but have fundamentally limited visibility due to occlusions, sensing range, and extreme weather and lighting conditions.

Our overall aim in this project is to synthesize desired behaviors in populations of bacterial and mammalian cells. To this goal, we define the basis of a next-generation cyber-physical system (CPS) called biological CPS (bioCPS). The enabling technologies are synthetic biology and micron-scale mobile robotics. Synthetic genetic circuits for decision making and local communication among the cells are automatically synthesized using a Bio-Design Automation (BDA) workflow.