Award Abstract #0547376
CAREER: Algorithms for Design of Active Fault-Tolerant Systems

NSF Org:	CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation
Initial Amendment Date:	January 23, 2006
Latest Amendment Date:	January 23, 2006
Award Number:	0547376
Award Instrument:	Standard Grant
Program Manager:	Christina L. Bloebaum CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation ENG Directorate for Engineering
Start Date:	May 1, 2006
Expires:	April 30, 2011 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date:	$400000
Investigator(s):	Hod Lipson hod.lipson@cornell.edu (Principal Investigator)
Sponsor:	Cornell University 373 Pine Tree Road ITHACA, NY 14850 607/255-5014
NSF Program(s):	ENGINEERING DESIGN AND INNOVAT
Field Application(s):	0308000 Industrial Technology
Program Reference Code(s):	MANU, 9148, 1187, 1045
Program Element Code(s):	1464

ABSTRACT

The focus of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is on predicting malfunction in a physical system and maintaining functionality in spite of severe faults, a common challenge in many technical fields, and of great ethical and economic importance. While traditional methods for fault-tolerance rely on passive measures such as redundancy, safety margins, and preventative maintenance, this project will develop a new active approach. This approach continuously reconstructs models of the current system from sensory data, and uses these models to assess failure and uncertainty, and to generate compensatory actions using design automation in-situ. This approach will be applied and evaluated on both quasi-static systems and dynamical systems across various scales and complexities.

If successful, the broader impacts of this research will lead to improvements in the ability of systems to autonomously identify and warn about potential failure, and even sustain operation and recover from some forms of damage. As systems are becoming increasingly complex, there is a need to transition from passive fault tolerance to active fault tolerance, where systems that can diagnose and repair faults autonomously. The method proposed here is domain-independent, and as such may be applied across many complex systems beyond those explicitly addressed in the proposed work, such as modeling of biological systems and medical diagnosis.

Educational activities will focus both on expansion of undergraduate curriculum in design for fault tolerance, and on a broader outreach program whose goal is to enhance hands-on engineering and science education for children and students through a library of 3D-printable educational models across several scientific fields

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

(Showing: 1 - 3 of 3).

Aquino W., Kouchmeshky B., Bongard J., Lipson H..  "Co-evolutionary algorithm for structural damage identification using minimal physical testing,"  Int. Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering,  v.69,  2006,  p. 1085.

Bongard J., Lipson H..  "Automated reverse engineering of nonlinear dynamical systems,"  Proceedings of the National Academy of Science,,  v.104,  2007,  p. 9943.

Bongard J.C., Zykov V., Lipson H..  "Resilient Machines through Self-Modeling,"  Science,  v.314,  2006,  p. 1118.


(Showing: 1 - 3 of 3).

Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.