CPS: Synergy: Foundations of Cyber-Physical Infrastructure for Creative Design and Making of Cyber-physical Products

Abstract:

The primary objective in this project is to lay the foundations of a cyber-physical infrastructure for creative design and making of realizable products by addressing fundamental barriers to participation, model- based engineering, and information sharing. The focus is on the following three aims:

(1) Reducing barriers to participation through natural interfaces between physical and virtual domains,
(2) Reducing barriers to model-based engineering in community-based production and innovation, and
(3) Overcoming information-related impediments to collaboration and information sharing, such as confidentiality of information.

During the first year of the project, the focus was on introducing a novel design paradigm that leverages users' manual dexterity to hold and expressively manipulate physical objects to provide meaningful spatial inputs into a virtual 3D design application. We demonstrated this paradigm through Proto-TAI, a virtual prototyping application where 2D shapes are spatially assembled to create meaningful 3D design concepts in an intuitive manner. The second major activity involved establishing new collaboration protocols for secure co-simulation and co-design. The third major activity involved creating a platform to support mechanics-based design exploration by creative designers, who may not have engineering knowledge and sophisticated design tools.

The project has contributed to the fields of engineering design and secure-multi-party computations. Within the field of engineering design, the contributions are: a) formulation of the co-design problem in a form that allows secure privacy preserving simulation of system behavior, b) new protocols for a specific co-design scenario, c) demonstration of the practical viability of co-design by multiple entities who view the parameters of their contributions to the joint design to be confidential, and d) proof-of-concept implementations. Proto-TAI serves as a powerful proof-of-concept for integrating physically mediated spatial interactions within 3D modeling systems. This work demonstrates how simple and ordinary objects can be used to provide high level inputs within a virtual design environment without the need for considerable training or practice. The proposed approach has novelties from the standpoint of secure multi-party computations. We do not use encryption and other cryptographic primitives, even though it is well known that techniques from the cryptographic area of secure multi-party computation are perfectly capable, in theory, of solving all of the co-design problems. This is primarily due to performance issues. The use of cryptographic techniques would involve operations like fully homomorphic encryption and secure circuit evaluation that, when used in the context of the mathematical calculations for engineering design, would be both very slow and very hard to implement. In contrast, the protocols developed in this project use the same mathematical primitives that arise anyway in the design process.

The overall expected outcome of this project is a new conceptualization of a cyber-physical infrastructure that would lower the barriers to participation in designing and making cyber-physical products. The outcomes will be validated by prototyping the cyber-physical infrastructure within the university environment. Different innovation scenarios will be simulated by creating social prototypes that embody specific online information exchange scenarios with varying levels of openness. Examples of such scenarios range from completely open product development as in the case of open source hardware development to customer-led innovation and design crowdsourcing where part of the intellectual capital is owned by a company whereas the other part is owned by the customers.