CPS Events
Energy Harvesting and Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Docking to Power a Persistent Presence of Oceanographic Instrumentation
Abstract
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) includes a focus on expanding a persistent presence of oceanographic instrumentation in the ocean. Projects include vehicle development and reliability, instrumentation development, autonomy, techniques for environmental energy harvesting, and autonomous vehicle docking for energy transfer. This talk will outline recent efforts to develop and field a small wave-energy harvesting device, and new docking techniques for the MBARI long-range autonomous underwater vehicle platform. A description of these efforts, results from recent deployments, an outline of the scientific explorations currently being supported, and possible collaborative opportunities will be presented.
Bio
Andrew Hamilton has served as the engineering division chair at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, CA since 2020, and has been a mechanical engineer at MBARI since 2002. He completed a B.S in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado in 1991, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. Andrew's engineering and research interests include energy harvesting for powering autonomous systems, deep-water mooring design, hydrodynamics of underwater vehicles, underwater vehicle docking, embedded systems, power electronics, and control systems.
Bracing for Interference: Electronic Warfare and its Spillover Effects
Abstract
Electronic warfare (EW) has historically been a highly classified topic. But its recent spillover effects on civil systems far from any battlefield demand more open discussion and research on the topic.
In response to the alarming recent uptick in GPS jamming and spoofing, and the dangers this poses for civil aviation, the ITU World Radio Conference passed a resolution in December 2023 to emphasize the protected status of the so-called RNSS bands in which GPS signals are transmitted. But it was not possible to get agreement on the resolution without introduction of an caveat that, ironically, weakens protections of these bands. This caveat states that UN member states have a right to deny access to GNSS signals for security or defense purposes. One may conclude from this that GNSS interference is here to stay: Any country claiming a defensive purpose can jam or spoof GNSS with impunity.
This presentation examines electronic warfare from an academic perspective, noting trends and technologies that are disrupting its practice and widening its effects.
Speaker Bio
Todd E. Humphreys (B.S., M.S., Utah State University; Ph.D., Cornell University) holds the Ashley H. Priddy Centennial Professorship in Engineering in the department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. He is Director of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group and of the UT Radionavigation Laboratory, where he specializes in the application of optimal detection and estimation techniques to positioning, navigation, and timing. His awards include the UT Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award (2012), the NSF CAREER Award (2015), the ION Thurlow Award (2015), the PECASE (NSF, 2019), the IEEE Walter Fried Best Paper Award (2012, 2020, 2023), and the ION Kepler Award (2023). He is a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation and of the Royal Institute of Navigation.
Synthesis and Verification of Neural Feedback Controllers for Temporal Logic Tasks
Abstract
Signal Temporal Logic (STL) has become a popular logic for expressing spatio-temporal requirements for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). In this presentation, we address the problems of synthesizing and verifying Neural Network (NN) controllers for general STL specifications. Namely, given an STL specification in discrete time, we show how to synthesize feed-forward neural network (NN) controllers with ReLU activations for bounded sets of initial conditions. A key component of our synthesis tools is the use of quantitative semantics for STL. We present different smooth semantics for STL that can improve the performance of training algorithms for complex STL specifications. Since synthesis methods based on backpropagation are limited to probabilistic guarantees of correctness, we also present complete bounded-time reachability methods for NN controllers for STL requirements. In the case where both the plant model and the controller are ReLU-activated neural networks, we reduce the STL verification problem to a reachability problem in ReLU neural networks. In this scenario, we can prove system safety and, in addition, analyze system robustness against the STL requirement. Finally, we show how such reachability analysis can be performed when the set of initial conditions is a truncated probability distribution. This line of work establishes a new research direction for the quantitative verification of NN-based control systems. We demonstrate the practical efficacy of our techniques on a number of examples of learning-enabled control systems.
Speaker Bio
Georgios Fainekos (aka Dr. Φ) is a Senior Principal Scientist at Toyota Motor North America, Research & Development. He received his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 where he was affiliated with the GRASP laboratory. He holds a Diploma degree (B.Sc. & M.Sc.) in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. Among other professional roles, he was a tenured faculty of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Arizona State University, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at NEC Laboratories America in the System Analysis & Verification Group. He is currently working on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) with a focus on autonomous mobile systems. His technical expertise is on formal verification and requirements, search-based testing, control theory, artificial intelligence, and optimization. In 2013, Dr. Fainekos received the NSF CAREER award and the ASU SCIDSE Best Researcher Junior Faculty Award. He has also been recognized with the top 5% teacher award in 2019 and 2021. His research has received several paper awards and nominations, and the 2008 Frank Anger Memorial ACM SIGBED/SIGSOFT Student Award. In 2016, Dr. Fainekos was the program co-Chair for the ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC).
Distributed Control & Optimization Framework for Multi-Agent Systems in Space Applications
Abstract
Cooperative control of multi-agent systems has garnered significant attention across scientific communities for its diverse applications, including aerial vehicle formation for search and rescue, environmental monitoring, autonomous rendezvous and docking in space exploration, mapping and exploration of unknown environments by a swarm of mobile robots, coordinated optimal energy arrangement in smart grids, and precision agriculture. The overarching objective in these scenarios is to develop distributed control algorithms where each agent leverages both its local information and the information from other networked agents. However, sensing and actuation limitations, network malfunctions, communication latency, and other system-specific requirements pose significant challenges and add complexity to achieving collective decision-making. In this presentation, we introduce a novel distributed control and computationally efficient optimization framework tailored for multi-agent systems in space applications.
Bio
Himadri Basu is a postdoctoral research scholar at the Hybrid Systems Laboratory, University of California Santa Cruz, currently working on autonomous rendezvous & docking of spacecraft in in-orbit servicing applications. His research interests are in the broad areas of control theory, cyber-physical systems, hybrid systems, and coordinated control of multi-agent systems in space applications. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of New Hampshire in 2020. Prior to joining UCSC, he worked on the formation reconfiguration control problem of multi-satellite clusters in low-earth orbits at the University of Vermont, and stabilization of networked control systems under measurement intermittency at the University of Grenoble Alpes, France.
Learning Safe Control Laws from Expert Demonstrations
Abstract
Learning-enabled autonomous control systems promise to enable many future technologies such as autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, and robotics. Accelerated by algorithmic and computational advances in machine learning and the availability of data, there has been tremendous success in the design of learning-enabled controllers. However, these exciting developments are accompanied by new fundamental challenges that arise regarding the safety of these increasingly complex control systems. In this talk, I will provide new insights and discuss exciting opportunities to learn verifiably safe control laws. Specifically, I will present an optimization framework to learn safe control laws from expert demonstrations in a setting where the system dynamics are at least partially known. In most safety-critical systems, expert demonstrations in the form of system trajectories that showcase safe system behavior are readily available or can easily be collected. I will propose a constrained optimization problem with constraints on the expert demonstrations and the system model to learn control barrier functions for safe control. Formal correctness guarantees are provided in terms of the density of the data and the smoothness of the system model and the learned control barrier function. In a next step, we will discuss how we can account for model uncertainty and for hybrid system models in this framework. Finally, we will see how we can learn safe control laws from high-dimensional sensor data such as cameras. We provide two empirical case studies on a self-driving car and a bipedal robot to illustrate the method.
Bio
Lars Lindemann is an Assistant Professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California where he leads the Safe Autonomy and Intelligent Distributed Systems (SAIDS) lab. There, he is also a member of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (by courtesy), the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center, and the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence. Between 2020 and 2022, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2020. Prior to that, he received the M.Sc. degree in Systems, Control and Robotics from KTH in 2016 and two B.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Information Engineering and in Engineering Management from the Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel in 2014. His research interests include systems and control theory, formal methods, and autonomous systems. Professor Lindemann received the Outstanding Student Paper Award at the 58th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and the Student Best Paper Award (as a co-advisor) at the 60th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. He was finalist for the Best Paper Award at the 2022 Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control and for the Best Student Paper Award at the 2018 American Control Conference.
