Matching Items (47)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Computer Science
- Creators: Fainekos, Georgios
Description
Robotic technology is advancing to the point where it will soon be feasible to deploy massive populations, or swarms, of low-cost autonomous robots to collectively perform tasks over large domains and time scales. Many of these tasks will require the robots to allocate themselves around the boundaries of regions or features of interest and achieve target objectives that derive from their resulting spatial configurations, such as forming a connected communication network or acquiring sensor data around the entire boundary. We refer to this spatial allocation problem as boundary coverage. Possible swarm tasks that will involve boundary coverage include cooperative load manipulation for applications in construction, manufacturing, and disaster response.
In this work, I address the challenges of controlling a swarm of resource-constrained robots to achieve boundary coverage, which I refer to as the problem of stochastic boundary coverage. I first examined an instance of this behavior in the biological phenomenon of group food retrieval by desert ants, and developed a hybrid dynamical system model of this process from experimental data. Subsequently, with the aid of collaborators, I used a continuum abstraction of swarm population dynamics, adapted from a modeling framework used in chemical kinetics, to derive stochastic robot control policies that drive a swarm to target steady-state allocations around multiple boundaries in a way that is robust to environmental variations.
Next, I determined the statistical properties of the random graph that is formed by a group of robots, each with the same capabilities, that have attached to a boundary at random locations. I also computed the probability density functions (pdfs) of the robot positions and inter-robot distances for this case.
I then extended this analysis to cases in which the robots have heterogeneous communication/sensing radii and attach to a boundary according to non-uniform, non-identical pdfs. I proved that these more general coverage strategies generate random graphs whose probability of connectivity is Sharp-P Hard to compute. Finally, I investigated possible approaches to validating our boundary coverage strategies in multi-robot simulations with realistic Wi-fi communication.
In this work, I address the challenges of controlling a swarm of resource-constrained robots to achieve boundary coverage, which I refer to as the problem of stochastic boundary coverage. I first examined an instance of this behavior in the biological phenomenon of group food retrieval by desert ants, and developed a hybrid dynamical system model of this process from experimental data. Subsequently, with the aid of collaborators, I used a continuum abstraction of swarm population dynamics, adapted from a modeling framework used in chemical kinetics, to derive stochastic robot control policies that drive a swarm to target steady-state allocations around multiple boundaries in a way that is robust to environmental variations.
Next, I determined the statistical properties of the random graph that is formed by a group of robots, each with the same capabilities, that have attached to a boundary at random locations. I also computed the probability density functions (pdfs) of the robot positions and inter-robot distances for this case.
I then extended this analysis to cases in which the robots have heterogeneous communication/sensing radii and attach to a boundary according to non-uniform, non-identical pdfs. I proved that these more general coverage strategies generate random graphs whose probability of connectivity is Sharp-P Hard to compute. Finally, I investigated possible approaches to validating our boundary coverage strategies in multi-robot simulations with realistic Wi-fi communication.
ContributorsPeruvemba Kumar, Ganesh (Author) / Berman, Spring M (Thesis advisor) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Bazzi, Rida (Committee member) / Syrotiuk, Violet (Committee member) / Taylor, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Despite incremental improvements over decades, academic planning solutions see relatively little use in many industrial domains despite the relevance of planning paradigms to those problems. This work observes four shortfalls of existing academic solutions which contribute to this lack of adoption.
To address these shortfalls this work defines model-independent semantics for planning and introduces an extensible planning library. This library is shown to produce feasible results on an existing benchmark domain, overcome the usual modeling limitations of traditional planners, and accommodate domain-dependent knowledge about the problem structure within the planning process.
To address these shortfalls this work defines model-independent semantics for planning and introduces an extensible planning library. This library is shown to produce feasible results on an existing benchmark domain, overcome the usual modeling limitations of traditional planners, and accommodate domain-dependent knowledge about the problem structure within the planning process.
ContributorsJonas, Michael (Author) / Gaffar, Ashraf (Thesis advisor) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Herley, Cormac (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
A Cyber Physical System consists of a computer monitoring and controlling physical processes usually in a feedback loop. These systems are increasingly becoming part of our daily life ranging from smart buildings to medical devices to automobiles. The controller comprises discrete software which may be operating in one of the many possible operating modes and interacting with a changing physical environment in a feedback loop. The systems with such a mix of discrete and continuous dynamics are usually termed as hybrid systems. In general, these systems are safety critical, hence their correct operation must be verified. Model Based Design (MBD) languages like Simulink are being used extensively for the design and analysis of hybrid systems due to the ease in system design and automatic code generation. It also allows testing and verification of these systems before deployment. One of the main challenges in the verification of these systems is to test all the operating modes of the control software and reduce the amount of user intervention.
This research aims to provide an automated framework for the structural analysis and instrumentation of hybrid system models developed in Simulink. The behavior of the components introducing discontinuities in the model are automatically extracted in the form of state transition graphs. The framework is integrated in the S-TaLiRo toolbox to demonstrate the improvement in mode coverage.
This research aims to provide an automated framework for the structural analysis and instrumentation of hybrid system models developed in Simulink. The behavior of the components introducing discontinuities in the model are automatically extracted in the form of state transition graphs. The framework is integrated in the S-TaLiRo toolbox to demonstrate the improvement in mode coverage.
ContributorsThekkalore Srinivasa, Rahul (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Mayyas, Abdel Ra’ouf (Committee member) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Robots are becoming an important part of our life and industry. Although a lot of robot control interfaces have been developed to simplify the control method and improve user experience, users still cannot control robots comfortably. With the improvements of the robot functions, the requirements of universality and ease of use of robot control interfaces are also increasing. This research introduces a graphical interface for Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) specifications for mobile robots. It is a sketch based interface built on the Android platform which makes the LTL control interface more friendly to non-expert users. By predefining a set of areas of interest, this interface can quickly and efficiently create plans that satisfy extended plan goals in LTL. The interface can also allow users to customize the paths for this plan by sketching a set of reference trajectories. Given the custom paths by the user, the LTL specification and the environment, the interface generates a plan balancing the customized paths and the LTL specifications. We also show experimental results with the implemented interface.
ContributorsWei, Wei (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Amor, Hani Ben (Committee member) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Traditional methods for detecting the status of traffic lights used in autonomous vehicles may be susceptible to errors, which is troublesome in a safety-critical environment. In the case of vision-based recognition methods, failures may arise due to disturbances in the environment such as occluded views or poor lighting conditions. Some methods also depend on high-precision meta-data which is not always available. This thesis proposes a complementary detection approach based on an entirely new source of information: the movement patterns of other nearby vehicles. This approach is robust to traditional sources of error, and may serve as a viable supplemental detection method. Several different classification models are presented for inferring traffic light status based on these patterns. Their performance is evaluated over real-world and simulation data sets, resulting in up to 97% accuracy in each set.
ContributorsCampbell, Joseph (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Ben Amor, Heni (Committee member) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Cyber-physical systems and hard real-time systems have strict timing constraints that specify deadlines until which tasks must finish their execution. Missing a deadline can cause unexpected outcome or endanger human lives in safety-critical applications, such as automotive or aeronautical systems. It is, therefore, of utmost importance to obtain and optimize a safe upper bound of each task’s execution time or the worst-case execution time (WCET), to guarantee the absence of any missed deadline. Unfortunately, conventional microarchitectural components, such as caches and branch predictors, are only optimized for average-case performance and often make WCET analysis complicated and pessimistic. Caches especially have a large impact on the worst-case performance due to expensive off- chip memory accesses involved in cache miss handling. In this regard, software-controlled scratchpad memories (SPMs) have become a promising alternative to caches. An SPM is a raw SRAM, controlled only by executing data movement instructions explicitly at runtime, and such explicit control facilitates static analyses to obtain safe and tight upper bounds of WCETs. SPM management techniques, used in compilers targeting an SPM-based processor, determine how to use a given SPM space by deciding where to insert data movement instructions and what operations to perform at those program locations. This dissertation presents several management techniques for program code and stack data, which aim to optimize the WCETs of a given program. The proposed code management techniques include optimal allocation algorithms and a polynomial-time heuristic for allocating functions to the SPM space, with or without the use of abstraction of SPM regions, and a heuristic for splitting functions into smaller partitions. The proposed stack data management technique, on the other hand, finds an optimal set of program locations to evict and restore stack frames to avoid stack overflows, when the call stack resides in a size-limited SPM. In the evaluation, the WCETs of various benchmarks including real-world automotive applications are statically calculated for SPMs and caches in several different memory configurations.
ContributorsKim, Yooseong (Author) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Thesis advisor) / Broman, David (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Testing and Verification of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a challenging problem. The challenge arises as a result of the complex interactions between the components of these systems: the digital control, and the physical environment. Furthermore, the software complexity that governs the high-level control logic in these systems is increasing day by day. As a result, in recent years, both the academic community and the industry have been heavily invested in developing tools and methodologies for the development of safety-critical systems. One scalable approach in testing and verification of these systems is through guided system simulation using stochastic optimization techniques. The goal of the stochastic optimizer is to find system behavior that does not meet the intended specifications.
In this dissertation, three methods that facilitate the testing and verification process for CPS are presented:
1. A graphical formalism and tool which enables the elicitation of formal requirements. To evaluate the performance of the tool, a usability study is conducted.
2. A parameter mining method to infer, analyze, and visually represent falsifying ranges for parametrized system specifications.
3. A notion of conformance between a CPS model and implementation along with a testing framework.
The methods are evaluated over high-fidelity case studies from the industry.
In this dissertation, three methods that facilitate the testing and verification process for CPS are presented:
1. A graphical formalism and tool which enables the elicitation of formal requirements. To evaluate the performance of the tool, a usability study is conducted.
2. A parameter mining method to infer, analyze, and visually represent falsifying ranges for parametrized system specifications.
3. A notion of conformance between a CPS model and implementation along with a testing framework.
The methods are evaluated over high-fidelity case studies from the industry.
ContributorsHoxha, Bardh (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Ben Amor, Heni (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The critical infrastructures of the nation are a large and complex network of human, physical and cyber-physical systems. In recent times, it has become increasingly apparent that individual critical infrastructures, such as the power and communication networks, do not operate in isolation, but instead are part of a complex interdependent ecosystem where a failure involving a small set of network entities can trigger a cascading event resulting in the failure of a much larger set of entities through the failure propagation process.
Recognizing the need for a deeper understanding of the interdependent relationships between such critical infrastructures, several models have been proposed and analyzed in the last few years. However, most of these models are over-simplified and fail to capture the complex interdependencies that may exist between critical infrastructures. To overcome the limitations of existing models, this dissertation presents a new model -- the Implicative Interdependency Model (IIM) that is able to capture such complex interdependency relations. As the potential for a failure cascade in critical interdependent networks poses several risks that can jeopardize the nation, this dissertation explores relevant research problems in the interdependent power and communication networks using the proposed IIM and lays the foundations for further study using this model.
Apart from exploring problems in interdependent critical infrastructures, this dissertation also explores resource allocation techniques for environments enabled with cyber-physical systems. Specifically, the problem of efficient path planning for data collection using mobile cyber-physical systems is explored. Two such environments are considered: a Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) environment with mobile “Tags” and “Readers”, and a sensor data collection environment where both the sensors and the data mules (data collectors) are mobile.
Finally, from an applied research perspective, this dissertation presents Raptor, an advanced network planning and management tool for mitigating the impact of spatially correlated, or region based faults on infrastructure networks. Raptor consolidates a wide range of studies conducted in the last few years on region based faults, and provides an interface for network planners, designers and operators to use the results of these studies for designing robust and resilient networks in the presence of spatially correlated faults.
Recognizing the need for a deeper understanding of the interdependent relationships between such critical infrastructures, several models have been proposed and analyzed in the last few years. However, most of these models are over-simplified and fail to capture the complex interdependencies that may exist between critical infrastructures. To overcome the limitations of existing models, this dissertation presents a new model -- the Implicative Interdependency Model (IIM) that is able to capture such complex interdependency relations. As the potential for a failure cascade in critical interdependent networks poses several risks that can jeopardize the nation, this dissertation explores relevant research problems in the interdependent power and communication networks using the proposed IIM and lays the foundations for further study using this model.
Apart from exploring problems in interdependent critical infrastructures, this dissertation also explores resource allocation techniques for environments enabled with cyber-physical systems. Specifically, the problem of efficient path planning for data collection using mobile cyber-physical systems is explored. Two such environments are considered: a Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) environment with mobile “Tags” and “Readers”, and a sensor data collection environment where both the sensors and the data mules (data collectors) are mobile.
Finally, from an applied research perspective, this dissertation presents Raptor, an advanced network planning and management tool for mitigating the impact of spatially correlated, or region based faults on infrastructure networks. Raptor consolidates a wide range of studies conducted in the last few years on region based faults, and provides an interface for network planners, designers and operators to use the results of these studies for designing robust and resilient networks in the presence of spatially correlated faults.
ContributorsDas, Arun (Author) / Sen, Arunabha (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Qiao, Chunming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Several physical systems exist in the real world that involve continuous as well as discrete changes. These range from natural dynamic systems like the system of a bouncing ball to robotic dynamic systems such as planning the motion of a robot across obstacles. The key aspects of effectively describing such dynamic systems is to be able to plan and verify the evolution of the continuous components of the system while simultaneously maintaining critical constraints. Developing a framework that can effectively represent and find solutions to such physical systems prove to be highly advantageous. Both hybrid automata and action languages are formal models for describing the evolution of dynamic systems. The action language C+ is a rich and expressive language framework to formalize physical systems, but can be used only with physical systems in the discrete domain and is limited in its support of continuous domain components of such systems. Hybrid Automata is a well established formalism used to represent such complex physical systems at a theoretical level, however it is not expressive enough to capture the complex relations between the components of the system the way C+ does.
This thesis will focus on establishing a formal relationship between these two formalisms by showing how to succinctly represent Hybrid Automata in an action language which in turn is defined as a high-level notation for answer set programming modulo theories (ASPMT) --- an extension of answer set programs in the first-order level. Furthermore, this encoding framework is shown to be more effective and expressive than Hybrid Automata by highlighting its ability in allowing states of a hybrid transition system to be defined by complex relations among components that would otherwise be abstracted away in Hybrid Automata. The framework is further realized in the implementation of the system CPLUS2ASPMT, which takes advantage of state of the art ODE(Ordinary Differential Equations) based SMT solver dReal to provide support for ODE based evolution of continuous components of a dynamic system.
This thesis will focus on establishing a formal relationship between these two formalisms by showing how to succinctly represent Hybrid Automata in an action language which in turn is defined as a high-level notation for answer set programming modulo theories (ASPMT) --- an extension of answer set programs in the first-order level. Furthermore, this encoding framework is shown to be more effective and expressive than Hybrid Automata by highlighting its ability in allowing states of a hybrid transition system to be defined by complex relations among components that would otherwise be abstracted away in Hybrid Automata. The framework is further realized in the implementation of the system CPLUS2ASPMT, which takes advantage of state of the art ODE(Ordinary Differential Equations) based SMT solver dReal to provide support for ODE based evolution of continuous components of a dynamic system.
ContributorsLoney, Nikhil (Author) / Lee, Joohyung (Thesis advisor) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
In recent years, there are increasing numbers of applications that use multi-variate time series data where multiple uni-variate time series coexist. However, there is a lack of systematic of multi-variate time series. This thesis focuses on (a) defining a simplified inter-related multi-variate time series (IMTS) model and (b) developing robust multi-variate temporal (RMT) feature extraction algorithm that can be used for locating, filtering, and describing salient features in multi-variate time series data sets. The proposed RMT feature can also be used for supporting multiple analysis tasks, such as visualization, segmentation, and searching / retrieving based on multi-variate time series similarities. Experiments confirm that the proposed feature extraction algorithm is highly efficient and effective in identifying robust multi-scale temporal features of multi-variate time series.
ContributorsWang, Xiaolan (Author) / Candan, Kasim Selcuk (Thesis advisor) / Sapino, Maria Luisa (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013