Recent progress in battery technology has made it possible to use batteries to power various physical platforms, such as ground/air/water vehicles. These platforms require hundreds/thousands of battery cells to meet their power and energy needs. Of these, automobiles, locomotives, and unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) face the most stringent environmental challenges. In particular, and of special importance to the automotive industry, is the transition from conventional powertrains to (plug-in) hybrid and electric vehicles, all of which are subject to environmental and operational variations.

Buildings are complex systems with profound impact on human health, productivity, comfort, and energy consumption. Smart building technology promises to improve many aspects of building operation by applying sensor data toward more informed and precise building operation. Smart buildings are one important dimension of enabling sustainable Smart Cities. One of the challenges in smart buildings is the selection, placement, and installation of multiple sensors in the building. This can be both an expensive and time consuming process.

This Smart and Connected Communities research project focuses on developing an innovative solution for enabling emergency communications during disaster recovery. An aerial base station can substitute for a damaged cell tower and provide cellular connectivity among the first responders and citizens who were impacted by a natural or manmade disaster until the damaged cell tower is restored. The project will lead to fundamental understanding of the science and engineering aspects of the design and deployment of aerial base stations.

The overarching project goal is to advance the design of opportunistic state-triggered aperiodic controllers for networked cyber-physical systems.  This poster considers the problem of event-triggered control design for cyberphysical systems with nonlinear dynamics under time-varying input delays.

Recently there is an increasing availability of smart wearables including smart watches, bands, buttons and pendants. Many of these devices are part of human-in-the-loop Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). With future fundamental advances in the intersection of communications, control, and computation for these energy and resource limited devices, there is a great potential to revolutionize many CPS applications.

Millions of mobile applications (apps) are being developed in domains such as energy, health, security, and entertainment. The US FDA expects that there will be 500 million smart phone users downloading healthcare related apps by the end of 2015. Many of these apps will perform interventions to control human physiological parameters such as blood pressure and heart rate. The intervention aspects of the apps can cause dependency problems, e.g., multiple interventions of multiple apps can increase or decrease each other’s effects, some of which can be harmful to the user.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that contain self-modifying smart components can improve and self-repair, but sometimes at the cost of impeding model-based Verification and Validation (V&V).  In this work, we focus on maintaining short and long range V&V capability in a system containing self-adaptive smart components. In this work, we focus on smart component based in-flight control adaptation of damaged Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicles (FW-MAV).

It's common in controller design to assume that the controller reads the sensors and writes to the actuators at the same time instant. This assumption is often violated in practice because the controller executes its code sequentially on a microprocessor. If the microprocessor is "fast enough," often the controller will still work. However, if the sensing and control are done by two different devices that must communicate across a network, the resulting timing uncertainty due to network delays and clock offsets will often destabilize the controller.