ABSTRACT

The project focuses on swarming cyber-physical systems (swarming CPS) consisting of a collection of mobile networked agents, each of which has sensing, computing, communication, and locomotion capabilities, and that have a wide range of civilian and military applications. Different from conventional static CPS, swarming CPS rely on mobile computing entities, e.g., robots, which collaboratively interact with phenomena of interest at different physical locations. This unique feature calls for novel sensing-motion co-design solutions to accomplish a variety of increasingly complex missions. Towards this, the overall research objective of this project is to establish and demonstrate a generic motion-sensing co-design procedure that will significantly reduce the complexity of the mission design for swarming CPS, and greatly facilitate the development of effective, efficient and adaptive control and sensing strategies under various environment uncertainties. This project aims to offer comprehensive scientific understanding of the dynamic nature of swarming CPS, contribute to generic engineering principles for designing collaborative control and sensing algorithms, and advance the enabling technologies of practically applying CPS in the challenging environment. The research solutions of this project aim to bring significant advance in the environmental sustainability, homeland security, and human well-being. The project provides unique interdisciplinary training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students through both research work and related courses that the PIs will develop and offer.

The project significantly advances the state of the art in cooperative control and sensing and provide an enabling technology for swarming CPS through highly interrelated thrusts: (1) a generic sensing and motion co-design procedure, which reveals the fundamental interplay between the sensing dynamics and motion dynamics of swarming CPS, will be proposed to facilitate the development of effective and efficient control and sensing strategies; (2) by following such co-design procedure, provable correct, computation efficient, and communication light control and sensing strategies will be developed for swarming CPS with constrained resources to accomplish specific missions, e.g., locating pollutants, in an unknown field, while navigating through uncertain spaces; (3) to provide an enabling mobile platform to verify the proposed strategies, innovative small, highly 3D maneuverable, noiseless, energy-efficient, and robust robotic fish fully actuated by smart material will be designed to meet the maneuvering requirements of the proposed algorithms; (4) novel Magnetic Induction (MI)-based underwater communication and localization solutions will be developed, which allows robotic fish to timely and reliably exchange messages, while simultaneously providing accurate inter-fish localization in the harsh 3D underwater environment; and (5) the proposed sensing-motion co-design strategies will be verified and demonstrated using a school of wirelessly interconnected robotic fish in both lab-based experiments and field experiments.

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