The objective of this research is to understand the loosely coupled networked control systems and to address the scientific and technological challenges that arise in their development and operation. The approach is to (1) develop a mathematical abstraction of the CPS, and an online actuation decision model that takes into account temporal and spatial dependencies among actions; (2) develop algorithms and policies to effectively manage the system and optimize its performance with respect to applications' QoS requirements; and (3) develop an agent-based event-driven framework to facilitate engineers easily monitor, (re)configure and control the system to achieve optimized results. The developed methodologies, algorithms, protocols and frameworks will be evaluated on testbeds and by our collaborating institution. The project provides fundamental understanding of loosely coupled networked control systems and a set of strategies in managing such systems. The components developed under this project enables the use of wireless-sensor-actuator networks for control systems found in a variety of disciplines and benefits waterway systems, air/ground transportation systems, power grid transmission systems, and the sort. The impact of this project is broadened through collaborations with our collaborating institution. This project provides a set of strategies and tools to help them meet the new standards. The inter-disciplinary labs and curriculum development at both undergraduate and graduate level with an emphasis on CPS interdisciplinary applications, theoretical foundations, and CPS implementations prepare our students as future workforce in the area of CPS applications.

The objective of this research is to define programming abstractions with temporal semantics for distributed cyber-physical systems. The approach is to create a coordination language for distributed embedded software that blends naturally with models of physical dynamics. The coordination language is based on a rigorous discrete-event concurrent model of computation. It will be used by system designers to construct models from which software implementations are derived. The objective is distributed software that, if it compiles for a platform, delivers precisely the temporal semantics specified in the model. Intellectual merit: This project addresses the core abstractions of computing, which throughout the 20th century, have abstracted away time, and of physical dynamics, which have omitted software and network behaviors. For cyber-physical systems, both are inappropriate. This project is developing new time-centric abstractions for software, programming models, analysis techniques, and integration of software and network models with physical dynamics. Broader impacts: Besides the considerable economic and societal impact of CPS in general, the project is expected to have considerable impact on engineering and computer science education. Its focus on engineering applications and on sound computer science methods will erode the boundaries between these disciplines that hamper competitiveness of our students. A new generation of students is needed to dramatically improve our energy efficiency, manufacturing capabilities, transportation efficiency, instrumentation prowess (and hence, scientific knowledge), and infrastructure robustness. Because of the broad societal implications of the work, it will help attract to engineering and computer science a more diverse talent pool.

The objective of this research is to develop algorithms and software for treatment planning in intensity modulated radiation therapy under assumption of tumor and healthy organs motion. The current approach to addressing tumor motion in radiation therapy is to treat it as a problem and not as a therapeutic opportunity. However, it is possible that during tumor and healthy organs motion the tumor is better exposed for treatment, allowing for the prescribed dose treatment of the tumor (target) while reducing the exposure of healthy organs to radiation. The approach is to treat tumor and healthy organs motion as an opportunity to improve the treatment outcome, rather than as an obstacle that needs to be overcome. Intellectual Merit: The leading intellectual merit of this proposal is to develop treatment planning and delivery algorithms for motion-optimized intensity modulated radiation therapy that exploit differential organ motion to provide a dose distribution that surpasses the static case. This work will show that the proposed motion-optimized IMRT treatment planning paradigm provides superior dose distributions when compared to current state-of-the art motion management protocols. Broader Impact: Successful completion of the project will mark a major step for clinical applications of intensity modulated radiation therapy and will help to improve the quality of life of many cancer patients. The results could be integrated within existing devices and could be used for training of students and practitioners. The visualization software for dose accumulation could be used to train medical students in radiation therapy treatment planning.

The objective of this research is to develop models, methods and tools for capturing and processing of events and actions in cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a manner that does not violate the underlying physics or computational logic. The project approach uses a novel notion of cyber-physical objects (CPO) to capture the mobility and localization of computation in cyber-physical systems using recent advances in geolocation and the Internet infrastructure and supports novel methods for spatiotemporal resource discovery. Project innovations include a model for computing spatiotemporal relationships among events of interests in the physical and logical parts of a CPS, and its use in a novel cyberspatial reference model. Using this model the project builds a framework for locating cyber-physical application services and an operating environment for these services. The project plan includes an experimental platform to demonstrate capabilities for building new OS services for CPS applications including collaborative control applications drawn from the intermodal transportation system. The project will enable design and analysis of societal scale applications such as the transportation and electrical power grid that also include a governance structure. It will directly contribute to educating an engineering talent pool by offering curricular training that range from degree programs in embedded systems to seminars and technology transfer opportunities coordinated through the CalIT2 institute at UCSD and the Institute for Sensing Systems (ISS) at OSU. The team will collaborate with the non-profit Milwaukee Institute to explore policies and mechanisms for enterprise governance systems.

The objective of this research is to develop a real-time operating system for a virtual humanoid avatar that will model human behaviors such as visual tracking and other sensori-motor tasks in natural environments. This approach has become possible to test because of the development of theoretical tools in inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) that allow the acquisition of reward functions from detailed measurements of human behavior, together with technical developments in virtual environments and behavioral monitoring that allow such measurements to be obtained. The central idea is that complex behaviors can be decomposed into sub-tasks that can be considered more or less independently. An embodied agent learns a policy for actions required by each sub-task, given the state information from sensori-motor measurements, in order to maximize total reward. The reward functions implied by human data can be computed and compared to those of an avatar model using the newly-developed IRL technique, constituting an exacting test of the system. The broadest impact of the project would provide a formal template for further investigations of human mental function. Modular RL models of human behavior would allow realistic humanoid avatars to be used in training for emergency situations, conversation, computer games, and classroom tutoring. Monitoring behavior in patients with diseases that exhibit unusual eye movements (e.g., Tourettes, Schizophrenia, ADHD) and unusual body movement patterns (e.g., Parkinsons), should lead to new diagnostic methods. In addition the regular use of the laboratory in undergraduate courses and outreach programs promotes diversity.

CPS: Small: Collaborative Research: Localization and System Services for SpatioTemporal Actions in Cyber-Physical Systems The objective of this research is to develop models, methods and tools for capturing and processing of events and actions in cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a manner that does not violate the underlying physics or computational logic. The project approach uses a novel notion of cyber-physical objects (CPO) to capture the mobility and localization of computation in cyber-physical systems using recent advances in geolocation and the Internet infrastructure and supports novel methods for spatiotemporal resource discovery. Project innovations include a model for computing spatiotemporal relationships among events of interests in the physical and logical parts of a CPS, and its use in a novel cyberspatial reference model. Using this model the project builds a framework for locating cyber-physical application services and an operating environment for these services. The project plan includes an experimental platform to demonstrate capabilities for building new OS services for CPS applications including collaborative control applications drawn from the intermodal transportation system. The project will enable design and analysis of societal scale applications such as the transportation and electrical power grid that also include a governance structure. It will directly contribute to educating an engineering talent pool by offering curricular training that range from degree programs in embedded systems to seminars and technology transfer opportunities coordinated through the CalIT2 institute at UCSD and the Institute for Sensing Systems (ISS) at OSU. The team will collaborate with the non-profit Milwaukee Institute to explore policies and mechanisms for enterprise governance systems.

The objective of this research is to create computational foundation, methods, and tools for efficient and autonomous optical micromanipulation using microsphere ensembles as grippers. The envisioned system will utilize a holographic optical tweezer, which uses multiple focused optical traps to position microspheres in three-dimensional space. The proposed approach will focus on the following areas. First, it will provide an experimentally validated optical-tweezers based workstation for concurrent manipulation of multiple cells. Second, it will provide algorithms for on-line monitoring of workspace to support autonomous manipulation. Finally, it will provide real-time image-guided motion planning strategies for transporting microspheres ensembles. The proposed work will lead to a new way of autonomously manipulating difficult-to-trap or sensitive objects using microspheres ensembles as reconfigurable grippers. The proposed work will also lead to fundamental advances in several cyber physical systems areas by providing new approaches to micromanipulations, fast and accurate algorithms with known uncertainty bounds for on-line monitoring of moving microscale objects, and real-time motion planning algorithms to transport particle ensembles. The ability to quickly and accurately manipulate individual cells with minimal training will enable researchers to conduct basic research at the cellular scale. Control over cell-cell interactions will enable unprecedented insights into cell signaling pathways and open up new avenues for medical diagnosis and treatment. The proposed integration of research with education will train students with a strong background in emerging robotics technologies and the inner workings of cells. These students will be in a unique position to rapidly develop and deploy specialized robotics technologies.

The objective of this research is to study the formal design and verification of advanced vehicle dynamics control systems. The approach is to consider the vehicle-driver-road system as a cyber-physical system (CPS) by focusing on three critical components: (i) the tire-road interaction; (ii) the driver-vehicle interaction; and (iii) the controller design and validation. Methods for quantifying and estimating the uncertainty of the road friction coefficient by using self-powered wireless sensors embedded in the tire are developed for considering tire-road interaction. Tools for real-time identification of nominal driver behavior and uncertainty bounds by using in-vehicle cameras and body wireless sensors are developed for considering driver-vehicle interaction. A predictive hybrid supervisory control scheme will guarantee that the vehicle performs safely for all possible uncertainty levels. In particular, for controller design and validation, the CPS autonomy level is continuously adapted as a function of human and environment conditions and their uncertainty bounds quantified by considering tire-road and driver-vehicle interaction. High confidence is critical in all human operated and supervised cyber-physical systems. These include environmental monitoring, telesurgery, power networks, and any transportation CPS. When human and environment uncertainty bounds can be predicted, safety can be robustly guaranteed by a proper controller design and validation. This avoids lengthy and expensive trial and error design procedures and drastically increases their confidence level. Graduate, undergraduate and underrepresented engineering students benefit from this project through classroom instruction, involvement in the research and substantial interaction with industrial partners from the fields of tires, vehicle active safety, and wireless sensors.

This proposed CPS project aims to enable intelligent telesurgery in which a surgeon, or a distributed team of surgeons, can work on tiny regions in the body with minimal access. The University of Washington will expand an existing open surgical robot testbed, and create a robust infrastructure for cyber-physical systems with which to extend traditional real-time control and teleoperation concepts by adding three new interfaces to the system: networking, intelligent robotics, and novel non-linear controllers. Intellectual Merit: This project aims to break new ground beyond teleoperation by adding advanced robotic functions. Equally robust and flexible networking, high-level interfaces, and novel controllers will be added to the existing sytsem. The resulting system will be an open architecture and a substrate upon which many cyber-physical system ideas and algorithms will be tested under realistic conditions. The platforms proven physical robustness will permit rigorous evaluation of results and the open interfaces will encourage collaboration and sharing of results. Broader Impacts: We expect the results to enable new research in multiple ways. First, the collaborators such as Johns Hopkins, U.C. Santa Cruz, and several foreign institutions will be able to remotely connect to new high level interfaces provided by this project. Second, for the first time a robust and completely open surgical telerobot will be available for research so that CPS researchers do not need to be limited to isolated toy problems but instead be able to prototype advanced surgical robotics techniques and evaluate them in realistic contexts including animal procedures.