For almost as long as people have been designing control systems, they have been asking “how can we prove that our controller will be safe?” For simple systems (e.g. linear or low-dimensional polynomial dynamics), we might be able to hand-analyze the system and prove that it will be safe, but this manual analysis quickly becomes […]

The Evolution of IoT: Diverging Application Requirements The Internet, long the domain of large and/or expensive devices, is now so pervasive that it is possible for tiny devices ranging from fitness trackers to doorbells to be interconnected, forming a bridge between the physical and digital worlds. Unfortunately, general-purpose operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, […]

As of 2023, the progress in deploying robots in the real world is hard to miss: autonomous vehicles actively drive passengers without safety drivers in San Francisco and Phoenix, personal drones for videography can autonomously track human movement despite hard-to-sense obstacles like tree branches, and lightweight robotic manipulators have become more accessible to people with […]

The second Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) Rising Stars Workshop, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, will be held at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA) on May 31, 2023. This workshop aims to identify and mentor outstanding PhD students and postdocs who are interested in pursuing academic careers in CPS related areas. It […]

Deep Samal, Dung Tran, and Marilyn Wolf are organizing a new workshop at CPS-IoT Week this year: the International Workshop on Perception for Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems (PerCPS ’23).  This workshop is intended to provide a bridge between machine learning for perception and cyber-physical systems. Perception is a critical capability for autonomous cyber-physical systems.  Cyber-physical automatons […]

Introduction Autonomous systems with learning-enabled components (LECs) rely on deep neural networks in order to achieve high performance for various applications. It is well known that neural networks are vulnerable to distribution shifts (e.g., weather changes and adversarial perturbations). This vulnerability raises the safety and robustness concerns of learning-enabled cyber-physical systems (CPS) in the real […]

We highlight a dangerous pitfall in the state-of-the-art evaluation methodology of deep learning algorithms, as applied in several CPS and IoT application spaces, where collecting data from physical experiments is difficult. The article is inspired by the real experiences of the authors. An extended version appears in the IoT-AE Workshop in conjunction with MILCOM 2022 […]

Machine learning is en vogue, being applied to many classes of problems. One of them is cybersecurity, where ML is used to find vulnerabilities in code, simulate attacks, and detect when an intruder has breached a system’s defenses. Ignoring that intrusion detection is an admission of defeat (it comes into play when your system is […]

Unlike most disciplines, in Computer Science, conference publications dominate over journals, and program committees carry out the bulk of the peer reviewing.  Serving on a PC is a yeoman’s service, and the community owes them a debt of gratitude. However, I believe that a toxic culture has emerged. This blog is a call for PCs […]

“FlyOS: Integrated Modular Avionics for Autonomous Multicopters” by Anam Farrukh and Richard West won the best student paper award from amongst the outstanding category of papers at the 28th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS) in 2022. This blog post gives an overview of the work.  From Federated to Integrated Architectures Traditionally, […]

Welcome to the trip report on the 28th IEEE International Symposium on Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS’22)! For the third time, our travel route does neither include planes nor trains but only a short walk to our desks. Due to the tapering pandemic, the General Chair Nan Guan had to re-organize the […]

A story heard thousands of times “Software complexity is increasing” — I’m sure this is not the first time, nor will be the last time you read this claim. It may sound rhetorical, but repeatedly claiming overtime that software complexity is increasing is nothing but a concrete observation about the incessant pace with which several […]

“Verified Lustre normalization with node subsampling” by Timothy Bourke, Basile Pesin, Paul Jeanmaire, and Marc Pouzet is the best paper winner of the International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT) in 2021. This blog post gives an overview of the work. The Coq development described in the paper is available online. There is also a page […]

Introduction Welcome back to a second hands-on blog post in which we explore the implementation of classic real-time concepts in POSIX operating systems. In a previous post, we examined the classic periodic task abstraction and how to implement it in Linux. This time around, let’s explore its equally well-known counterpart: the sporadic task model for […]

In July, we held another successful ECRTS, with high quality papers, great sense of community, novel concepts, and the same spirit as in previous years. Behind the scenes, however, significant changes happened. The group of persons responsible for the development and organization of the conference, the Executive Board of the Technical Committee of Real-time Systems […]

Take 100 lines of C code and a hardware platform. How long will it take for the hardware to execute the code? Being able to construct an answer to this question in the scope of real-time systems is akin to solving one of the Millenium Prize Problems. Of course, the first instinct is to wonder if any loop in the code makes this question equivalent to solving the halting problem. Yet, the problem stands even if we assume a perfectly sequential list of instructions. One could even make the (not so) provocative statement that predicting the timing of a single instruction can be challenging.

Note: This article was originally published in ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems. The citation of and the link to the original article: C. Lu, Toward a Scientific and Engineering Discipline of Cyber-Physical Systems, ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, 5(3), Article 22e, July 2021. Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are driving a wide range of exciting applications from smart […]

About two years ago, as new members of the SIGBED executive committee (EC), we decided to replace the SIGBED review with a blog that could serve as an informal medium for the SIGBED community. After receiving input from the SIGBED EC members and months of preparation, we finally launched the blog in April 2020. So […]

In RTAS 2021, we organized a panel discussion on “RTOS for Autonomous Machines”. The panelists are Shinpei Kato (The University of Tokyo & Tier IV, Inc.), Andrei Kholodnyi (Wind River Systems), Shaoshan Liu (PerceptIn), Jan Staschulat (Robert Bosch GmbH), and Richard West (Boston University). An interesting topic discussed during the panel is “Will there be […]

  Formal verification of cyber-physical systems (CPS) requires reasoning methods for not just software, but also analyzing how the physical side of the system will behave. As the laws of nature are written in differential equations, CPS formal verification researchers have inevitably needed to create analysis methods that can analyze systems with differential equations. For […]