The major objective of our consortium is the development of a rigorous theoretical foundation, and scalable analytical tools and paradigms, so that such systems can be systematically constructed and their performance formally verified.  More generally, the activity of this program can be expected to have a dramatic impact on understanding and designing large-scale robust real-time distributed systems. Our goals are to make use of recent algorithmic developments to provide hard performance guarantees and bounds for systems performing sophisticated tasks in uncertain and dynamic physical situations.

The focus of our project is on the control algorithms and internal software required to develop systems which are verifiably robust. Such systems must operate under situations with significant external environmental uncertainty, combined with malicious attacks and rapidly evolving mission objectives, and these issues are a central concern for current and future autonomous systems.  A major direction of the proposed program is the frontier between the design methodologies of distributed software systems and those of robust feedback control, an area which holds significant promise for advances with dramatic theoretical and practical impact.