Battery-free sensors are annually attached to billions of items including pharmaceutical drugs, clothes, and manufacturing parts. The fundamental challenge with these sensors is that they are only reliable at short distances. As a result, today’s systems for communicating with and localizing battery-free sensors are crippled by the limited range. This research proposes a cyber-physical system architecture that can overcome this challenge to enable sensing, communicating with, and localizing these sensors at an unprecedented scale.

Molecular programming uses the computational power of DNA and other biomolecules to create nanoscale systems. Many of these envisioned nano-systems are safety-critical, such as diagnostic biosensors that detect contam-inants, drug capsules that dispense medicine when they encounter diseased cells, and configurable nano-robots. Challenges to the safety engineering of the nano-systems include their probabilistic behavior, their very small size, the very large number of them that execute at once, and the dynamic envi-ronment in which they operate.

This project develops a theoretical framework as well as software tools to support testing and verification of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) within a Model-Based Design (MBD) process. The theoretical bases of the framework are stochastic optimization methods, and robustness notions of formal specification languages.

The internet-of-things (IoT) revolution is bringing millions of physical devices online (e.g. cars, UAVs, homes, medical devices), enabling them to connect to each other in real-time, as well as to cloud services. Wireless communication will be critical in providing IoT connectivity. This work focuses on low-latency and ultra-reliable communications and networking that is critical for latency-sensitive, closed-loop control applications, like vehicle to vehicle communications, collaborative swam planning, and industrial control.

In a cyber-physical system, the operation of the physical plant is typically maintained by closed-loop control, which is intended to keep the plant process variables in a desired range. A major part of any control system is its instrumentation, i.e., sensors and actuators. Due to information exchange between the controller and the instrumentation, the control system performance may be compromised by attacks on its sensors and actuators.

Overview. The Internet of Things (IoT) leverages Internet technology in cyber-physical systems, but the protocols and principles of the Internet were not designed for interacting with the physical world. For example, timeliness is not a factor in any widespread Internet technology, with Quality-of-Service (QoS) features having been routinely omitted for decades.

In this poster, we briefly present the overview of this CPS project and our research progress in its first two years. The overall goals of this project are to develop onboard-adaptable and personalizable human driver models, create revolutionary driver-specific and personalized vehicle active motion control systems, design dynamic onboard real-time computation task scheduling methods, and integrate real-time V2V communications with driver-vehicle-pair-specific inter-vehicle motion control methods.

A significant gap exists between how computer-vision software and embedded safety-critical software define the term real time. In computer vision, "real time" often means "real fast" and refers to high average throughput with low latency. In contrast, safety-critical embedded systems consider "real time" to be a statement about predictable timing under continuous performance. Put in a larger context, this disparity in definitions is merely a symptom of the fact that, historically, computer vision and embedded systems have evolved independently.