Shoukry, Krishnaprasad receive NSF grant for resilient-by-cognition cyber-physical systems

Assistant Professor Yasser Shoukry (ECE) is the principal investigator and Professor P. S. Krishnaprasad (ECE/ISR) is the co-PI for a three-year, $797K award from the National Science Foundation for “Resilient-by-Cognition Cyber-Physical Systems.” The research addresses resilience for autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) by integrating concepts from game theory, formal methods, and controls.

Autonomous systems in general and self-driving cars in particular, hold the promise to be one of the most disruptive technologies emerging in recent years. However, the safety and resilience of these systems, if not proactively addressed, will pose a significant threat potentially impairing our relationship with these technologies and may lead to a societal rejection of adopting them permanently. The research will address such concerns by equipping autonomous systems with an additional layer of intelligence, allowing them to be resilient-by-cognition.

The researchers will illustrate their approach over key applications including self-driving cars and autonomous drone swarms. The approach includes:

• A principled framework for formally reasoning about cognitive CPS; that is, given a set of strategies captured in a formal language (e.g., temporal logic), the proposed framework builds on ideas from evolutionary game theory to understand which strategies lead to the best fit when operating in adversarial environments;

• On-the-fly, correct-by-design feedback controller synthesis that executes the chosen strategy while satisfying physical constraints imposed by the micro-dynamics of the underlying CPS; and

• A data-driven strategy-mining approach that addresses the fundamental problem of designing the library of strategies from human demonstrations.

Published October 1, 2018