We transitioned from a tethered system to a fully wearable mobile one, which is suitable for clinical applications. We designed the textile components of the exosuit to provide unilateral assistance to the paretic limb of persons poststroke during walking. The suit provides partial assistance to ankle dorsiflexion (DF) and ankle plantarflexion (PF) and encourages a more symmetric and natural gait. The results of our treadmill-based study show that the exosuit could improve interlimb propulsion symmetry and ankle kinematics of seven chronic poststroke patients.

The project studies techniques for constructing guaranteed-safe control algorithms for maneuvering autonomous vehicles ("self-driving cars") under a variety of environmental conditions. Existing autonomous vehicles are able to navigate highways and surface streets reliably when the driving conditions do not pose significant challenges. However, future vehicles will need to handle pot-holes, snow, high winds, driving rain, darting animals, fog and all the other impediments that make driving in the real world challenging in the first place.

Large scale applications of cyber physical systems (CPS) such as commercial buildings with Building Automation System (BAS)-based demand response (DR) can play a key role in alleviating demand peaks and associated grid stress, increased electricity unit cost, and carbon emissions. However, benefits of BAS alone are often limited because their demand peak reduction cannot be maintained long enough without unduly affecting occupant comfort. This project seeks to develop control algorithms to closely integrate battery storage-based DR with existing BAS capabilities.

 

 Our research addresses the competitive-strategic domain for two opposing teams of agents, which we model in the general framework of a repeated game over network. We are motivated by applications in which, somewhat abstractly, a large collection of autonomous agents must play a game against an adversary or a team of adversaries. We note these applications need not involve explicit adversarial interactions.

Our overall aim in this project is to synthesize desired behaviors in populations of bacterial and mammalian cells. To this goal, we define the basis of a next-generation cyber-physical system (CPS) called biological CPS (bioCPS). The enabling technologies are synthetic biology and micron-scale mobile robotics. Synthetic genetic circuits for decision making and local communication among the cells are automatically synthesized using a Bio-Design Automation (BDA) workflow.

Cyber-physical processors work in harsh environments and often suffer very high operating temperatures.  High temperatures accelerate processor aging and increase failure rate.  Effective thermal-aware management is required to meet the computational demands of the application while reducing processor thermal stress.

The objective of this project is to improve the performance of autonomous systems in dynamic environments by integrating perception, planning paradigms, learning, and databases. For the next generation of autonomous systems to be truly effective in terms of tangible performance improvements (e.g., long-term operations, complex and rapidly changing environments), a new level of intelligence must be attained.