This CPS Frontiers project addresses highly dynamic Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), understood as systems where a computing delay of a few milliseconds or an incorrectly computed response to a disturbance can lead to catastrophic consequences. Such is the case of cars losing traction when cornering at high speed, unmanned air vehicles performing critical maneuvers such as landing, or disaster and rescue response bipedal robots rushing through the rubble to collect information or save human lives. The preceding examples currently share a common element: the design of their control software is made possible by extensive experience, laborious testing and fine tuning of parameters, and yet, the resulting closed-loop system has no formal guarantees of meeting specifications. The vision of the project is to provide a methodology that allows for complex and dynamic CPSs to meet real-world requirements in an efficient and robust way through the formal synthesis of control software. The research is developing a formal framework for correct-by-construction control software synthesis for highly dynamic CPSs with broad applications to automotive safety systems, prostheses, exoskeletons, aerospace systems, manufacturing, and legged robotics. The design methodology developed here will improve the competitiveness of segments of industry that require a tight integration between hardware and highly advanced control software such as: automotive (dynamic stability and control), aerospace (UAVs), medical (prosthetics, orthotics, and exoskeleton design) and robotics (legged locomotion). To enhance the impact of these efforts, the PIs are developing interdisciplinary teaching materials to be made freely available and disseminating their work to a broad audience.

This CPS Frontiers project addresses highly dynamic Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), understood as systems where a computing delay of a few milliseconds or an incorrectly computed response to a disturbance can lead to catastrophic consequences. Such is the case of cars losing traction when cornering at high speed, unmanned air vehicles performing critical maneuvers such as landing, or disaster and rescue response bipedal robots rushing through the rubble to collect information or save human lives. The preceding examples currently share a common element: the design of their control software is made possible by extensive experience, laborious testing and fine tuning of parameters, and yet, the resulting closed-loop system has no formal guarantees of meeting specifications. The vision of the project is to provide a methodology that allows for complex and dynamic CPSs to meet real-world requirements in an efficient and robust way through the formal synthesis of control software. The research is developing a formal framework for correct-by-construction control software synthesis for highly dynamic CPSs with broad applications to automotive safety systems, prostheses, exoskeletons, aerospace systems, manufacturing, and legged robotics. The design methodology developed here will improve the competitiveness of segments of industry that require a tight integration between hardware and highly advanced control software such as: automotive (dynamic stability and control), aerospace (UAVs), medical (prosthetics, orthotics, and exoskeleton design) and robotics (legged locomotion). To enhance the impact of these efforts, the PIs are developing interdisciplinary teaching materials to be made freely available and disseminating their work to a broad audience.

Continuous real-time tracking of the eye and field-of-view of an individual is profoundly important to understanding how humans perceive and interact with the physical world. This work advances both the technology and engineering of cyber-physical systems by designing an innovative paradigm involving next-generation computational eyeglasses that interact with a user's mobile phone to provide the capability for real-time visual context sensing and inference. This research integrates novel research into low-power embedded systems, image representation, image processing and machine learning, and mobile sensing and inference, to advance the state-of-art in continuous sensing for CPS applications. The activity addresses several fundamental research challenges including: 1) design of novel, highly integrated, computational eyeglasses for tracking eye movements, the visual field of a user, and head movement patterns, all in real-time; 2) a unified compressive signal processing framework that optimizes sensing and estimation, while enabling re-targeting of the device to perform a broad range of tasks depending on the needs of an application; 3) design of a novel real-time visual context sensing system that extracts high-level contexts of interest from compressed data representations; and 4) a layer of intelligence that combines contexts extracted from the computational eyeglass together with contexts obtained from the mobile phone to improve energy-efficiency and sensing accuracy. This technology can revolutionize a range of disciplines including transportation, healthcare, behavioral science and market research. Continuous monitoring of the eye and field-of-view of an individual can enable detection of hazardous behaviors such as drowsiness while driving, mental health issues such as schizophrenia, addictive behavior and substance abuse, neurological disease progression, head injuries, and others. The research provides the foundations for such applications through the design of a prototype platform together with real-time sensor processing algorithms, and making these systems available through open source venues for broader use. Outreach for this project includes demonstrations of the device at science fairs for high-school students, and integration of the platform into undergraduate and graduate courses.

The project aims at making cities "smarter" by engineering processes such as traffic control, efficient parking services, and new urban activities such as recharging electric vehicles. To that end, the research will study the components needed to establish a Cyber-Physical Infrastructure for urban environments and address fundamental problems that involve data collection, resource allocation, real-time decision making, safety, and security. Accordingly, the research is organized along two main directions: (i) Sensing and data acquisition using a new mobile sensor network paradigm designed for urban environments; and (ii) Decision Support for the "Smart City" relying on formal verification and certification methods coupled with innovative dynamic optimization techniques used for decision making and resource allocation. The work will bring together and build upon methodological advances in optimization under uncertainty, computer simulation, discrete event and hybrid systems, control and games, system security, and formal verification and safety. Target applications include: a "Smart Parking" system where parking spaces are optimally assigned and reserved, and vehicular traffic regulation. The research has the potential of revolutionizing the way cities are viewed: from a passive living and working environment to a highly dynamic one with new ways to deal with transportation, energy, and safety. Teaming up with stakeholders in the Boston Back Bay neighborhood, the City of Boston, and private industry, the research team expects to establish new collaborative models between universities and urban groups for cutting-edge research embedded in the deployment of an exciting technological, economic, and sociological development.

This NSF Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Frontiers project "Foundations Of Resilient CybEr-physical Systems (FORCES)" focuses on the resilient design of large-scale networked CPS systems that directly interface with humans. FORCES aims to pr ovide comprehensive tools that allow the CPS designers and operators to combine resilient control (RC) algorithms with economic incentive (EI) schemes. Scientific Contributions The project is developing RC tools to withstand a wide-range of attacks and faults; learning and control algorithms which integrate human actions with spatio-temporal and hybrid dynamics of networked CPS systems; and model-based design to assure semantically consistent representations across all branches of the project. Operations of networked CPS systems naturally depend on the systemic social institutions and the individual deployment choices of the humans who use and operate them. The presence of incomplete and asymmetric information among these actors leads to a gap between the individually and socially optimal equilibrium resiliency levels. The project is developing EI schemes to reduce this gap. The core contributions of the FORCES team, which includes experts in control systems, game theory, and mechanism design, are the foundations for the co-design of RC and EI schemes and technological tools for implementing them. Expected Impacts Resilient CPS infrastructure is a critical National Asset. FORCES is contributing to the development of new Science of CPS by being the first project that integrates networked control with game theoretic tools and the economic incentives of human decision makers for resilient CPS design and operation. The FORCES integrated co-design philosophy is being validated on two CPS domains: electric power distribution and consumption, and transportation networks. These design prototypes are being tested in real world scenarios. The team's research efforts are being complemented by educational offerings on resilient CPS targeted to a large and diverse audience.

This NSF Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Frontiers project "Foundations Of Resilient CybEr-physical Systems (FORCES)" focuses on the resilient design of large-scale networked CPS systems that directly interface with humans. FORCES aims to pr ovide comprehensive tools that allow the CPS designers and operators to combine resilient control (RC) algorithms with economic incentive (EI) schemes. Scientific Contributions The project is developing RC tools to withstand a wide-range of attacks and faults; learning and control algorithms which integrate human actions with spatio-temporal and hybrid dynamics of networked CPS systems; and model-based design to assure semantically consistent representations across all branches of the project. Operations of networked CPS systems naturally depend on the systemic social institutions and the individual deployment choices of the humans who use and operate them. The presence of incomplete and asymmetric information among these actors leads to a gap between the individually and socially optimal equilibrium resiliency levels. The project is developing EI schemes to reduce this gap. The core contributions of the FORCES team, which includes experts in control systems, game theory, and mechanism design, are the foundations for the co-design of RC and EI schemes and technological tools for implementing them. Expected Impacts Resilient CPS infrastructure is a critical National Asset. FORCES is contributing to the development of new Science of CPS by being the first project that integrates networked control with game theoretic tools and the economic incentives of human decision makers for resilient CPS design and operation. The FORCES integrated co-design philosophy is being validated on two CPS domains: electric power distribution and consumption, and transportation networks. These design prototypes are being tested in real world scenarios. The team's research efforts are being complemented by educational offerings on resilient CPS targeted to a large and diverse audience.

The objective of this research is to address issues related to the platform revolution leading to a third generation of networked control systems. The approach is to address four fundamental issues: (i) How to provide delay guarantees over communication networks to support networked control? (ii) How to synchronize clocks over networks so as to enable consistent and timely control actions? (iii) What is an appropriate architecture to support mechanisms for reliable yet flexible control system design? (iv) How to provide cross-domains proofs of proper performance in both cyber and physical domains? Intellectual Merit: Currently neither theory nor networking protocols provide solutions for communication with delay constraints. Coordination by time is fundamental to the next generation of event-cum-time-driven systems that cyber-physical systems constitute. Managing delays and timing in architecture is fundamental for cyberphysical systems. Broader Impact: Process, aerospace, and automotive industries rely critically on feedback control loops. Any platform revolution will have major consequences. Enabling control over networks will give rise to new large scale applications, e.g., the grand challenge of developing zero-fatality highway systems, by networking cars traveling on a highway. This research will train graduate students on this new technology of networked control. The Convergence Lab (i) has employed minority undergraduate students, including a Ron McNair Scholar, as well as other undergraduate and high school researchers, (ii) hosts hundreds of high/middle/elementary school students annually in Engineering Open House. The research results will be presented at conferences and published in open literature.

The objective of this research is to establish a foundational framework for smart grids that enables significant penetration of renewable DERs and facilitates flexible deployments of plug-and-play applications, similar to the way users connect to the Internet. The approach is to view the overall grid management as an adaptive optimizer to iteratively solve a system-wide optimization problem, where networked sensing, control and verification carry out distributed computation tasks to achieve reliability at all levels, particularly component-level, system-level, and application level. Intellectual merit. Under the common theme of reliability guarantees, distributed monitoring and inference algorithms will be developed to perform fault diagnosis and operate resiliently against all hazards. To attain high reliability, a trustworthy middleware will be used to shield the grid system design from the complexities of the underlying software world while providing services to grid applications through message passing and transactions. Further, selective load/generation control using Automatic Generation Control, based on multi-scale state estimation for energy supply and demand, will be carried out to guarantee that the load and generation in the system remain balanced. Broader impact. The envisioned architecture of the smart grid is an outstanding example of the CPS technology. Built on this critical application study, this collaborative effort will pursue a CPS architecture that enables embedding intelligent computation, communication and control mechanisms into physical systems with active and reconfigurable components. Close collaborations between this team and major EMS and SCADA vendors will pave the path for technology transfer via proof-of-concept demonstrations.

The national transmission networks that deliver high voltage electric power underpin our society and are central to the ongoing transformation of the American energy infrastructure. Transmission networks are very large and complicated engineering systems, and "keeping the lights on" as the transformation of the American energy infrastructure proceeds is a fundamental engineering challenge involving both the physical aspects of the equipment and the cyber aspects of the controls, communications, and computers that run the system. The project develops new principles of cyber-physical engineering by focusing on instabilities of electric power networks that can cause blackouts. It proposes novel approaches to analyze these instabilities and to design cyber-physical control methods to monitor, detect, and mitigate them. The controls must perform robustly in the presence of variability and uncertainty in electric generation, loads, communications, and equipment status, and during abnormal states caused by natural faults or malicious attacks. The research produces cyber-physical engineering methodologies that specifically help to mitigate power system blackouts and more generally show the way forward in designing robust cyber-physical systems in environments characterized by rich dynamics and uncertainty. Education and outreach efforts involve students at high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels, as well as dissemination of results to the public and the engineering and applied science communities in industry, government and universities.

This project, investigating active building facades that proactively contribute to energy conservation by changing their opacity and air permeability as a function of environmental and user parameters, promises to contribute strongly to both the cyber and physical sciences. Often energy is wasted when parts of a building are heated or cooled, but are not actually used, or when they are actively cooled if simply opening a window would suffice. The proposed "Self-Organizing Amorphous Facades" (SOAF) consist of a large number of identical cells that can each change their opacity and air permeability, sense light, temperature, and occupancy, and communicate with each other in a distributed collective. For complex cyber physical systems, this promises to provide a novel design methodology that is potentially applicable to a large class of systems and, therefore, will result in foundational knowledge of use to the community at large. This high-risk, high-reward project integrates ideas from computer science and engineering, with a little human physiology and environmental science thrown in, to develop new theoretical foundations for the design, validation, and improvement of coordination strategies for multi-agent robotic systems. The project's intellectual merit lies in novel algorithms that allow one to take advantage of distributed computation to drastically reduce the dimensionality of the data coming from the system, and novel algorithms that turn low-dimensional control data to the system into high-dimensional control signals. In particular, this research focuses on distributed algorithms that can identify regions that share similar spatio-temporal data, distributed algorithms that recognize patterns and gestures in spatio-temporal data sets, and distributed algorithms that automatically derive distributed policies for global control signals on temperature and light. Broader Impacts: The direct impact of this project will be huge potential reduction in the energy footprint of modern buildings by active lighting and ventilation control. A related impact is the introduction of novel ways of using space using truly reconfigurable walls. Due to its interdisciplinary nature spanning computer science and civil engineering together with its positive environment implications, this project is likely to be attractive to students with a broad range of backgrounds and interests. It will lead to educational modules that let students explore energy, heat transfer and solar gains in a building using sensors, wireless technologies, and algorithms, and introduce students to the challenges of complex cyber-physical systems. The PI proposes outreach to women and minorities and suggests a novel mechanism of comic distribution via HowToons.com that will make technical results and environmental impact of CPS accessible to a wide audience.