The objective of this research is to investigate how to replace human decision-making with computational intelligence at a scale not possible before and in applications such as manufacturing, transportation, power-systems and bio-sensors. The approach is to build upon recent contributions in algorithmic motion planning, sensor networks and other fields so as to identify general solutions for planning and coordination in networks of cyber-physical systems. The intellectual merit of the project lies in defining a planning framework, which integrates simulation to utilize its predictive capabilities, and focuses on safety issues in real-time planning problems. The framework is extended to asynchronous coordination by utilizing distributed constraint optimization protocols and dealing with inconsistent state estimates among networked agents. Thus, the project addresses the frequent lack of well-behaved mathematical models for complex systems, the challenges of dynamic and partially-observable environments, and the difficulties in synchronizing and maintaining a unified, global world state estimate for multiple devices over a large-scale network. The broader impact involves the development and dissemination of new algorithms and open-source software. Research outcomes will be integrated to teaching efforts and undergraduate students will be involved in research. Underrepresented groups will be encouraged to participate, along with students from the Davidson Academy of Nevada, a free public high school for gifted students. At a societal level, this project will contribute towards achieving flexible manufacturing floors, automating the transportation infrastructure, autonomously delivering drugs to patients and mitigating cascading failures of the power network. Collaboration with domain experts will assist in realizing this impact.

Tens of thousands of the nation?s bridges are structurally deficient. This project proposes to design a self sustaining, wireless structural monitoring system. The novel low-power Flash FPGA-based hardware platform and the corresponding software architecture offer a radically new approach to CPS design. A soft multi-core platform where software modules that run in parallel will be guaranteed to have dedicated single-threaded soft processor cores enables flexible power management by running only the necessary cores at any given time at the slowest clock rate mandated by the observed/controlled physical phenomena. As bridges tend to vibrate due to wind and dynamic load conditions, we are developing a novel vibration-based energy harvesting device that is capable of automatically adjusting its resonant response in order to capture much more energy than the current techniques can. Moreover, the PIs are developing structural health assessment techniques involving quantitative analysis of signals to determine crack type, location and size. The technology will indicate structural problems before they become critical potentially saving human lives and averting late and extensive repairs. The impact of the vibration harvesting technique and the soft multi-core architecture will go beyond structural monitoring. A separate soft core dedicated to each software component that interacts with the physical world will make CPS more responsive while saving power at the same time. The education plan focuses on outreach toward underrepresented minorities by recruiting such undergraduates to participate in the research. To facilitate the dissemination of our results, all hardware designs and software developed under this project will be open source.