Despite their importance within the energy sector, buildings have not kept pace with technological improvements and particularly the introduction of intelligent features. A primary obstacle in enabling intelligent buildings is their highly distributed and diffuse nature. To address this challenge, a modular approach will be investigated for building design, construction, and operation that would completely transform the building industry.

The goal of this project is to create a scalable and robust cyber-physical system (CPS) framework for the observation and control of the functional interdependencies between bridge structures (stationary physical systems) and trucks (mobile physical agents). A CPS framework (Figure 1) is being developed to monitor and control trucks within a single highway corridor to manage the imposed loads and the consumption of structural life by trucks on highway infrastructure including bridges. The framework begins with the installation of wireless sensing

Many safety-critical cyber-physical systems rely on advanced sensing capabilities to react to changing environmental conditions. However, cost-effective deployments of such capabilities have remained elusive. Such deployments will require software infrastructure that enables multiple sensor-processing streams to be multiplexed onto a common hardware platform at reasonable cost, as well as tools and methods for validating that required processing rates can be maintained.

Shared hardware resources like caches and memory introduce timing unpredictability for real-time systems. Worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis with shared hardware resources is often so pessimistic that the extra processing capacity of multicore systems is negated. We propose techniques to improve performance and schedulability for multicore systems.

Security and privacy concerns in the increasingly interconnected world are receiving much attention from the research community, policymakers, and general public.  However, much of the recent and on-going efforts concentrate on privacy in communication and social interactions.  The advent of cyber-physical systems, which aim at tight integration between distributed computational intelligence, communication networks, physical world, and human actors, opens new possibilities for developing intelligent systems with new capabilities.

The current lack of toolchain for high confidence testing, validation and verification of advanced, connected and automated/autonomous vehicles can impede and even entirely prevent the introduction of such vehicles into mass production. To address this challenge, this projects develops theory, methods, and tools for generating and optimizing test trajectories and data inputs that can maximize opportunities to uncover faults in both physical and cyber domain in future automotive vehicles.

Episodic brain disorders such as epilepsy have a considerable impact on a patient’s productivity and quality of life and may be life-threatening when seizures cannot be controlled with medications. We will create a second generation brain-implantable sensing and stimulating device (BISSD) based on CPS principles and practice. The BISSD will be composed of modules placed intracranially to continuously monitor brain state and vulnerability to seizure and intervene with electrical stimulation to block the development of seizure.

The broad goal of this project is to advance both the foundations and the enabling technologies in the field of human-machine systems, with a focus on exercise and rehabilitation machines. One of the motivations of our project is the observation that advances in exercise devices are mostly seen in their haptic interfaces rather than their intrinsic capabalities. Also, our collaboration with NASA on exercise machines for astronauts has motivaed us to investigate this aspect of human-machine interaction.

This project aims at deriving a scalable, correct-by-construction formal design methodology for multi-robot systems that can guarantee the accomplishment of high-level team missions through automatic synthesis of local coordination mechanisms and control laws. The basic idea is to decompose the team mission into individual subtasks such that the design can be reduced to local synthesis problems for individual robots. Multidisciplinary approaches combining hybrid systems, supervisory control, regular inference and model checking are utilized to achieve this goal.