Research Area: Autonomous and Cyber-Physical Systems

Autonomous and Cyber-Physical Systems

Systems that benefit from a tight coupling of the modeling and analysis of physical plants and the hardware/software systems that control such plants are referred to as Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). The goal is to better integrate principles of control theory with real-time and embedded systems design, rather than designing the control strategies and their implementation platforms independently, which has traditionally been the case. Such a holistic design reduces the need for testing, and ad hoc implementations of controllers on distributed embedded platforms, and instead, supports automated synthesis, verification and certification.

Subareas: Real-time and Embedded Systems, Sensor Systems, Mobile Computing, Control Theory and Systems, Formal Methods, Automated Verification and Certification

As we are rapidly moving towards the design of autonomous systems, such a disciplined approach towards the design and implementation of control algorithms, as promoted by CPS, is increasingly becoming important. The presence of complex sensors, like cameras, radars, and lidars – that are today common in autonomous cars, drones, or robots – introduce large processing delays, and offer different tradeoffs between accuracy, delay and resource requirements. These tradeoffs need to be explicitly accounted for when designing control algorithms that use such sensors. The distributed and multicore processing platforms on which control algorithms are implemented today also defy the traditional view of a centralized controller that has a synchronized access to all sensors, can compute all control inputs instantaneously, and can provide all actuations synchronously. Instead new controller design and implementation strategies that marry control theory with formal methods, and other branches of Computer Science like program analysis and compilers is becoming important.