Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a new class of system characterized by embedded computation and communication integrated deeply and seamlessly with the physical world in ways that support new capabilities in physical systems. Examples of such systems and applications include future transportation systems, the intelligent power grid, and nano-scale precision manufacturing systems. The goals of research in CPS are to understand the fundamental science and to develop rapid, reliable design and integration techniques applicable to a wide variety of cyber-physical systems.
Robotic systems are a class of CPS. The ability of robots to interact intelligently with the world rests upon embedded computation and communication, real-time control, and perception of the world. Future robotic systems that will realize the vision of CPS include increasingly intelligent surgery systems, robots for assisted living, and robot teams for exploration and emergency response. The goal of this workshop will be to identify research themes in robotics that generalize to the larger CPS domain and general themes from CPS that could advance robotics research. We expect the proposed workshop to be fruitful, because the robotics community has great collective experience in combining physical and computational thinking, and because there has not previously been a workshop that focused on the connections between robotics and CPS.
The proposed workshop will encourage robotics researchers to participate in NSF?s CPS Initiative and to seek out opportunities for collaboration with researchers in other domains to develop fundamental CPS principles that will be broadly applicable.
