Overview

The TerraSwarm Research Center aims to enable the simple, reliable, and secure deployment of a multiplicity of advanced distributed sensecontrol-actuated applications on shared, massively distributed, heterogeneous, and mostly uncoordinated swarm platforms through an open and universal systems architecture.

The hurdles that must be overcome to achieve this mission are enormous. They range from management and interpretation of vast quantities of data, to implementing effective security protocols across hardware and software networks with no clear physical boundaries. They will require us to develop applications in which components appear and disappear, and which compete with other applications for resources. In the TerraSwarm, communication can be intermittent, sensors can fail, adversaries such as criminals and terrorists can attempt to recruit resources for their own purposes. Subsystems will need to be dynamically combined (composed) with other subsystems to adapt to changing resources and missions, requiring innovative new design and test methodologies.

Research Focus

The TerraSwarm Resource Center takes a multi-disciplinary, collaborative approach to addressing the technical and conceptual hurdles outlined above, leveraging the team's expertise in a wide range of relevant technologies.The effort is organized around three themes:

1. Proactive Worlds
2. Methodologies, Models and Tools
3. Services and Cloud Interaction

The themes will be addressed within the context of the larger TerraSwarm effort rather than as separable projects; specifically, every effort will be made to ensure that no organizational structure interferes with integration of the effort across themes.

The goal of Theme 1 is to develop infrastructural software and architectural techniques for a proactive world, where networked sensors and actuators enable cooperating computing and networking infrastructure provide environments for humans to operate in. Theme 2 will focus on methodologies, algorithms and software tools for the design and analysis of heterogeneous dynamic architectures that will be adapted online to provide dynamic services. Theme 3 will focus on technologies for scalable, adaptive composition of heterogeneous services.