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.

This research assesses the threat of cyber-physical attacks to manufacturing systems that change the design of a physical part, elude quality control measures, and result in part failure. This goal is achieved through the development of: a cyber-physical attack taxonomy, framework to assess levels of cyber-physical vulnerability, models to detect and diagnose the presence of attacks in real-time, and side-channel detection techniques specific to manufacturing.

Due to increasing use by civil and federal authorities and vast commercial and amateur applications, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) will be introduced into the National Air Space (NAS); the question is only how we can do this safely. NASA and the FAA are designing a new automated air traffic control system (NextGen) for all aircraft, manned or unmanned. New algorithms and tools need to be developed to enable computation of the complex questions inherent in designing such a system while proving adherence to rigorous safety standards.

This first-year project will develop a cyber-physical co-design process and apply it to the manufacturing of large-scale libraries of synthetic DNA oligonucleotides. Synthetic DNA plays an essential role in genomics research, and is poised for widespread consumption if its costs can be lowered dramatically, as large libraries of different DNA sequences are particularly useful in genetic analysis. DNA is also being investigated as a high-density medium for archival storage of digital data.

This project aims at accelerating the deployment of security measures for cyber-physical systems (CPSs) by proposing a framework that combines anomaly identification approaches, which emphasizes on the development of decentralized cyber-attack monitoring and diagnostic-like components, with robust control countermeasure to improve reliability and maintain system functionality. One of the main challenges for cyber physical systems is the security of transmitted data over the communication network.