CAREER: Privacy-Aware Collaborative Sensing and Control for Cloud-Enabled Automotive Vehicles

这项学院早期职业发展计划(Career)赠款将支持研究，这些研究将有助于与云支持的汽车相关的新方法，促进科学进步和提高交通安全和效率。随着5G技术的到来，云计算有望通过提供大数据和实时、高保真的计算能力，为汽车应用带来革命性的变化。尽管云计算前景看好，但由于在通信隐私和许多汽车系统固有的实时限制方面的担忧，云计算在汽车车辆控制和传感方面的成功仍然有限。该奖项支持基础研究，以解决基于云的控制、协作传感、分散优化和隐私保护方面的主要挑战。新的设计和方法将在云促进的协作传感和控制方面提供一个变革性的框架，无缝集成云和车辆资源，以实现更智能、更安全和更环保的下一代汽车系统。这项研究与开发高效、安全和安全的交通系统相关的关键社会目标是协同的。因此，这项研究的结果将有利于美国的经济和生活质量。这项研究涉及控制理论、机器学习、车辆动力学和隐私保护等多个学科。这种多学科的方法还促进了未被充分代表的群体参与研究，并对工程教育产生了积极影响。云促进的协作传感和控制预计将极大地提高车辆控制性能，并实现更好的安全性、能效和乘坐舒适性。为实现这一目标，计划实现四个紧密结合的研究目标：1)开发一种新型的隐私保护、基于学习的协同感知框架，以实现在保护隐私的同时，可迭代地改进对重要道路信息(如黑冰和坑洞)的估计；2)形式化和合成隐私感知的云辅助控制，以无缝集成云和车载控制，从而在不泄露车辆隐私的情况下提高性能；3)通过显式利用互联车辆中的稀疏通信/约束拓扑，开发一个计算效率高、保护隐私的分布式控制框架；以及4)通过大量的模拟和实验来评估和验证框架。总而言之，这些研究工作的进展有望使基于云的车辆控制实际上可行，并将为时间敏感的动力系统创建新的精度友好和计算高效的隐私机制。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant will support research that will contribute novel methodologies related to cloud-enabled automotive vehicles, promoting both the progress of science and advancing transportation safety and efficiency. With the advent of 5G technology, cloud computing is expected to revolutionize automotive applications by providing “big data” and real-time, high-fidelity computing capabilities. Despite its promise, the use of cloud computing in automotive vehicle control and sensing still has limited success due to concerns in communication privacy and real-time constraints inherent to many automotive systems. This award supports fundamental research that addresses the major challenges in cloud-based control, collaborative sensing, decentralized optimization, and privacy preservation. The new designs and methodologies will offer a transformative framework in cloud-facilitated collaborative sensing and control that seamlessly integrate cloud and vehicle resources to enable smarter, safer, and greener next-generation automotive systems. This research is synergistic with key societal goals related to developing efficient, secure, and safe transportation systems. Therefore, results from this research will benefit the U.S. economy and life quality. This research involves several disciplines including control theory, machine learning, vehicle dynamics, and privacy preservation. The multi-disciplinary approach also facilitates the participation of underrepresented groups in research and positively impacts engineering education.The cloud-facilitated collaborative sensing and control is expected to greatly enhance vehicle control performance, and achieve improved safety, energy efficiency, and ride comfort. In pursuit of this goal, four closely integrated research objectives are planned: 1) Develop a novel privacy-preserving, learning-based collaborative sensing framework to enable the exploitation of multiple heterogeneous vehicles to iteratively improve the estimation of important road information (e.g., black ice and pothole) while preserving privacy; 2) Formalize and synthesize privacy-aware cloud-facilitated control to seamlessly integrate cloud and onboard controls for enhanced performance without leaking vehicle privacy; 3) Develop a computationally-efficient, privacy-preserving decentralized control framework by explicitly exploiting the sparse communication/constraint topologies in connected vehicles, and 4) Evaluate and validate the frameworks through extensive simulations and experiments. Collectively, advances from these research endeavors are expected to make cloud-based vehicle controls practically viable, and it will create new accuracy-friendly and computationally-efficient privacy mechanisms for time-sensitive dynamical systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.