When Robots Invaded the Senate
At the heart of “Robots” are resilient mixed-criticality systems
called cyber-physical systems (CPSs) .
. the National Science Foundation
discusses the basics of these systems
and details a recent luncheon briefing and open house
on CPSs for members of the U.S. Senate.
. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Solicitation Frequently Asked Questions .
. CPS Summit site .
CPS Summit Report (pdf):
Despite the 70-year history of computing
and the 200+- year history of engineering physical control systems
the fields of computer science and control theory
have remained largely separate, both technically and culturally.
This separation extends to virtually all domains where
computers interact with the physical world.
Methods for designing computer systems and physical systems
are based on simplifying assumptions about each other
that limit the range of systems that we can build.
On the one hand, computer engineering cannot translate
requirements for physical systems, such as stability,
into computational requirements on performance, power consumption, etc.
On the other hand,
control and signal processing theory
has abstracted computers largely as
infallible numerical devices.
This simplification ignores many important aspects of computing,
such as increasingly larger timing variance
due to caches and energy management
and increasingly higher software error rates caused by complexity.
The viability of future CPS must also address
noise in measurements,
inaccuracies in actuation,
disturbances from the environment,
and faults and failures in the computational process
in a coherent, unified framework.
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