Swarm Lab

Mission: Our mission includes designing and developing new methodologies, software, and hardware, and educating the next generation of engineers. 

Cyber-physical systems integrate computing, networking, physical, and human components. Applications include transportation systems, automation, security, smart buildings, smart cities, medical systems and human advancement, energy generation and distribution, water distribution, agriculture, process control, asset management, and robotics. IoT applies Internet technology to CPS applications.

The work is organized around two cooperating SwarmLab centers:

• Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems Center (iCyPhy) & Distributed Dynamic Systems (DDS)
• The Human Intranet (HI)

iCyPhy (pronounced eye-sigh-fie) focuses on design, modeling, and analysis techniques for CPS and IoT, with emphasis on industrial applications.  It is committed to developing open-source software supporting the design and implementation of secure, reliable, and robust systems.

DDS is focused on networking technology for next generation Internet applications with an emphasis on how to adapt Internet technology for secure and safety-critical environments and how to manage highly dynamic systems.

The Human Intranet center is focused on integrating humans into cyber-physical applications and developing new mechanisms for humans to interact with and leverage technology.

All SwarmLab centers are collaborative efforts between academia and industry. Member companies provide financial support for research projects, interact collaboratively with researchers, participate in educational outreach programs, and commercialize research results. We are committed to open publication and open-source release of software and hardware designs using a BSD-style license and will not seek IP protection for research results unless there is an overwhelmingly compelling case that IP protection is necessary for the results to have impact.

Specific current research directions include:

• Human-in-the-loop systems.
• Systems-of-systems design.
• Semantics of timed systems.
• Model-based design of cyber-physical systems.
• Highly dynamic networked systems.
• The Internet of things (IoT).
• Edge computing, fog computing, and smart gateways.
• Time-sensitive networking.
• Safety, privacy, and security for IoT.
• Learning and synthesis for cyber-physical systems.
• Localization and location-aware services.
• Learning and optimization in safety-critical systems.
• Heterogeneous systems.