Dynamic Distributed 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.

Research Focus under Claire Tomlin:

UAV Traffic Management
Safe Learning
Reachability in High Dimensions
Societal Scale Infrastructure Systems
VehiCal

Research Focus under John Kubiatowicz:

Secure Datagram Routing Protocol
Global Data Plane
SwarmContainers

Research Focus under Alexandre Bayen:

Connected Corridors

Faculty:

Automatic Controller Design via Gaussian Processes

Traditional optimal control schemes, such as LQR, MPC, relies on an accurate model of the underlying system. Modeling accuracy, therefore, directly impacts controller success and performance. However, often it is hard to capture the global dynamics with a high accuracy. To overcome this problem, we develop an active learning framework based on Bayesian optimization that can automate the process of controller design for a specific task even in the absence of dynamics model based on the performance observed in experiments on the physical system. We aim for information-efficient approaches,...

Global Data Plane

Motivation

As we discuss in a recent paper: The Cloud is not Enough: Saving IoT from the Cloud, the widespread practice of constructing Swarm applications by directly connecting with the cloud comes with a variety of downsides. With the GDP, we seek an infrastructure that enables important new use-cases for the cloud while still integrating smoothly with existing Cloud infrastructure.

Vision

The Global Data Plane (GDP) provides a data-centric glue...

Swarm Box

Just as there has been a dramatic build-out of wireless communication infrastructure over the last decade or so, there will be a similar build-out of more capable infrastructure that we call the “immobiles.” These are compute and communication nodes that provide vendor-neutral gateways between local devices and services (accessible via local wireless or wired networks) and a hierarchy of computing and networked services including the cloud. Such an infrastructure extends the cloud by giving it a presence close to the end devices that interact with the physical world (a vision that Cisco...

Decomposition of Dynamical Systems for Reachability Analysis

Reachability analysis provides optimal control and guarantees for safety-critical dynamic systems. However, the computational complexity of reachability analysis grows exponentially with system dimension, making this method intractable for high-dimensional or multi-agent systems. We are working on finding approximate and exact solutions to high-dimensional reachability problems by decomposing systems into multiple subsystems. These subsystems can be solved separately, then recombined to provide full system information.