Prof. Vincenzo Liberatore
Department of EECS, Case School of Engineering
The Internet is a pervasive infrastructure for interacting with and affecting
remote environments. The Internet creates a virtual world that transcends
the physical boundaries that tie human beings to their physical locations.
The network allows any user to exert meaningful actions on this virtual world
from any network access point. We envisage a future when remote interactions
will not be confined to a virtual world and users will be enabled to directly
interact with, modify, and control a remote physical environment. We envision
that users will be able to control physical remote surroundings with the same
ease with which they can now purchase shares on the stock market. The networked
flow of information and action devices will achieve the ultimate degree of
control over the physical world; tangible benefits will include advances in
factory automation, terrestrial and space exploration, and domestic robotics.
Immediate advantages will be felt in the research infrastructure, as investigators
in the experimental sciences will be able to access, manipulate, and share
remote laboratory facilities.
In this talk, we will describe two on-going projects in this area: remote
robotic manipulation and foundations of networked control systems. In remote
robotic manipulation, the real-time constraints have been encapsulated within
the local robotic controller through the methods of compliant control, and
such low-level API is the foundation for distributed applications that are
evolvable, survivable, and that can guarantee stability and compliance even
in the face of failures and lack of QoS provisioning. The foundations work
aims at characterizing the core properties of networked control systems. Our
methodology is currently centered on the joint simulation of systems and networks.
(Joint work with M. S. Branicky, W. S. Newman, S. Phillips, A. Al-Hammouri, A. Covitch, and D. Rosas).