News

PRECISE Center hosted CPS Week on April 8 – 11, 2013.

On March 26, 2013 Insup Lee delivered a distinguished lecture Assuring the Safety, Security, and Reliability of Medical-Device Cyber-Physical Systems  as part of Wayne State University Department of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series.

Rahul Mangharam, Stephen J. Angello Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award for his proposal, “Foundations for Modeling and Verification of Medical Cyber-Physical Systems.” 

On February 25, 2013 Insup Lee gave a talk "Assuring the Safety, Security, and Reliability of Medical-Device Cyber-Physical Systems (MDCPS)" at UNC-Chapel Hill's Triangle Computer Science Distinguished Lecturer Series.

The following joint paper (with KAIST) has received the best paper award at IEEE RTSS (Real-Time Systems Symposium) 2012:

Hoon Sung Chwa, Hyoungbu Back, Sanjian Chen, Jinkyu Lee, Arvind Easwaran, Insik Shin and Insup Lee,
Extending Task-level to Job-level Fixed Priority Assignment and Schedulability Analysis Using Pseudo-deadlines.
 

ProtoDrive: An Experimental Platform for Electric Vehicle Energy Scheduling and Control
by
William Price, Harsh Jain, Yash Pant, Mark Gallagher, Rahul Mangharam

When you want to drive from Philadelphia to New York City, Google or Garmin maps will tell you the distance and time. While this is sufficient information for your conventional vehicle, if you are driving an electric vehicle you need to know the total energy required for the journey. Vehicles involved in urban commutes are subjected to highly variable loads as they traverse varying gradients and stop-and-go traffic. Electric Vehicles can achieve a high efficiency under these conditions due to their ability to recover energy during braking. However, the high current loads during both charging and discharging cause battery energy losses, making them less efficient and degrading their useful lifetime. Super capacitors work well under high power charge and discharge cycles, however, their high cost and low energy density prevent them from being a viable replacement for batteries. A hybrid system consisting of a battery and a super capacitor has the potential to offer the benefits of both devices, which may increase vehicle range and battery lifetime. Consequently, the goal of the project is to:

(a) investigate the use of a hybrid battery/super capacitor system in response to real commuter drive cycles.
(b) develop scheduling algorithms that optimize the flow of energy between the battery, super capacitor and motor.

To this effect, we are developing a low cost, small-scale electric vehicle platform called Protodrive which is capable of simulating a drive cycle in hardware, while remaining small enough to fit on a lab desk. It consists of a physical model of an electric vehicle powertrain (motor, controller, battery, super capacitor) coupled to an active dynamometer, making it possible to run the powertrain through its full speed and torque range. Electronic control of the platform enables consistent testing conditions and fair comparison between battery and hybrid systems, and simulation in hardware will capture elements of the real system that may be missed in an idealized software model.

Project blog – http://protodrive.blogspot.com/2012/04/demo-day.html

Drs. Insup Lee (PI), Rahul Mangharam, Nathan Michael, George Pappas, Oleg Sokoslky, Stephanie Weirich (Penn) and Paulo Tabuada (UCLA) received a multidisciplinary grant of $4.8M from DARPA’s High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS) Program for “SPARCS: Synthesis of Platform-aware Attack-Resilient Control Systems”

On behalf of National Academy of Engineering Rahul Mangharam was invited to speak at the 2012 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium (US FOE) scheduled for September 13-15, 2012, at the GM Tech Center in Warren, Michigan.

The U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium is a 2-1/2-day meeting convened annually since 1995 by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The program brings together outstanding engineers (ages 30-45) from industry, academia, and government to discuss pioneering technical work and leading-edge research in various engineering fields and industry sectors. Frontiers of Engineering was initiated to provide an opportunity for top-notch engineers, early in their careers, to learn about cutting-edge developments in fields other than their own, thereby facilitating collaborative work and the transfer of new approaches and techniques across fields.

This award of $40,000 is aimed at promoting collaboration between academic faculty and Intel researchers. The program provides financial and networking support to those faculty members who are early in their careers and who show great promise as future academic leaders in disruptive computing technologies.

The Generic Infusion Pump project, led by Insup Lee, is featured in the article on open-source medical devices in the Economist magazine.