CPS: Breakthrough: Robust Team-Triggered Coordination for Real-Time Control of Networked Cyber-Physical Systems
NSF award info
Division of Computer and Network Systems
Program Manager: David Corman
NSF Award CNS-1329619
Duration: October 1, 2013 - September 30, 2018
Summary
The aim of this project is to lay down the foundations of a novel approach to real-time control of networked cyber-physical systems (CPS) that leverages their cooperative nature. Most networked controllers are not implementable over embedded digital computer systems because they rely on continuous time or synchronous executions that are costly to enforce. These assumptions are unrealistic when faced with the cyber-physical world, where the interaction between computational and physical components is multiplex, information acquisition is subject to error and delay, and agent schedules are asynchronous. Even without implementation obstacles, the periodic availability of information leads to a wasteful use of resources. Tuning controller execution to the task at hand offers the potential for great savings in communication, sensing, and actuation. The goal of this project is to bring this opportunity to fruition by combining event- and self-triggered control ideas into a unified approach that inherits the best of both models. The key conceptual novelty is for agents to make promises to one another about their future states and warn each other if they later decide to break them. The information provided by promises allows agents to autonomously determine when fresh information is needed, resulting in an efficient network performance.
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We seek to develop theory and algorithms for designing implicitly verified control systems that can operate efficiently under communication, sensing and/or actuator resource constraints, which are inherent to networked cyber-physical systems. In particular, we seek to bring to fruition the potential of opportunistic state-triggered (event-, self-, team-) aperiodic control in the context of distributed multi-agent systems. In networked cyber physical systems, information is communicated between different components over communication channels (indicated by dotted lines) with possibly low, time varying and unreliable channel capacity. |
Our current research in this project is focused on the following directions.
Development of methods for designing distributed event-triggered communication and control for multi-agent average consensus problem. Average consensus has applications both in multi-robot coordination problems and as a computational tool in a variety of distributed multi-agent systems.
Development of methods for designing event-triggered controllers that operate under bounded bit rates. In networked cyber-physical systems communication resources are often limited, which imposes severe constraints on the available bit rates. Our approach is based on combining the strengths of event-triggered control and information-theoretic control.
Development of state-triggered policies for coordinating intersection crossing by multiple vehicles to significantly reduce stop times and increase fuel efficiency. This thread is motivated by emerging technologies in intelligent transportation systems such as vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication with the potential to hugely impact safety, traveling ease, travel time, and energy consumption.
Development of privacy-preserving policies for coordination of networked cyberphysical systems. We aim to develop strategies with proven security properties, including resilience to post-processing and auxiliary information and independence from the model of the adversary.