Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being increasingly deployed in critical infrastructures such as electric-power, water, transportation, and other networks. These deployments are facilitating real-time monitoring and closed-loop control by exploiting the advances in wireless sensor-actuator networks, the internet of “everything,” data-driven analytics, and machine-to-machine interfaces. CPS operations depend on the synergy of computational and physical components.

Traffic control management strategies have been largely focused on improving vehicular traffic flows on highways and freeways but arterials have not been used properly and pedestrians are mostly ignored. New urban arterial designs encourage modal shifts which gives further impetus to devise novel traffic control strategies to more quickly respond to changing conditions and salient events, while balancing safety and efficiency for all users.

Automation is being increasingly introduced into every man-made system. The thrust to achieve trustworthy autonomous systems, which can attain goals independently in the presence of significant uncertainties and for long periods of time without any human intervention, has always been enticing. Significant progress has been made in the avenues of both software and hardware for meeting these objectives. However, technological challenges still exist and particularly in terms of decision making under uncertainty.

This project combines Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and gigabit networks to address major health concerns due to air pollution. A wide range of health outcomes are affected by air pollution. In March 2014 the World Health Organization (WHO) released a report that in 2012 alone, a staggering 7 million people died as a result of air pollution exposure, one in eight of the total global deaths. A major component of this pollution is airborne particulate matter. Approximately 50 million Americans have allergic diseases.

Visual identification of structural flaws is quite valuable not only to predict an imminent collapse of a bridge, but also to determine effective precautionary measures and repairs.

This project aims to investigate energy and delay sensitive sensing, communication, decision-making and control in the context of cyber physical systems. We particularly focus on systems where sensors with varying accuracy observe heterogeneous source signals that must be processed and communicated and used for inference and decision-making purposes.

A challenge for assisting young developmentally-delayed children in learning to walk is to (1) stabilize medio-lateral body sway while promoting opportunities for exploratory behavior, and (2) develop gait that exploits exchange of potential and kinetic energy. To meet the challenge, we have built a modular multi-robot CPS: a scaffold that applies forces at the pelvis via cables to modulate and stabilize center of mass behavior, and a wearable robot that applies assistive torques at the hip.

The recent increase in the variety and usage of wearable sensing systems allows for the continuous monitoring of health and wellness of users. The output of these systems enable individuals to make changes to their personal routines in order to minimize exposures to pollutants and maintain healthy levels of exercise. Furthermore, medical practitioners are using these systems to monitor proper activity levels for rehabilitation purposes and to monitor threatening conditions such as heart arrhythmias.

Our  proposal’s main objective is to realize cyber-physical platform and principles for (i) interrogating global modalities of intracellular transport with causative factors isolated at the single-molecule scale and (ii) realizing efficient and robust infrastructure for transporting micron/molecular scale cargo using distributed strategies We are realizing  in-vitro, a transport network with roadways formed by microtubules where motorproteins, kinesin and dynein, will form vehicles ferrying cargo.