A ''technology lottery'' describes a research idea or technology succeeding over others because it is suited to the available software and hardware, not necessarily because it is superior to alternative directions--examples abound, from the synergies of deep learning and GPUs to the disconnect of urban design and autonomous vehicles. The nascent field of Self-Driving Laboratories (SDL), particularly those implemented as Materials Acceleration Platforms (MAPs), is at risk of an analogous pitfall: the next logical step for building MAPs is to take existing lab equipment and workflows and mix in some AI and automation. In this whitepaper, we argue that the same simulation and AI tools that will accelerate the search for new materials, as part of the MAPs research program, also make possible the design of fundamentally new computing mediums. We need not be constrained by existing biases in science, mechatronics, and general-purpose computing, but rather we can pursue new vectors of engineering physics with advances in cyber-physical learning and closed-loop, self-optimizing systems. Here we outline a simulation-based MAP program to design computers that use physics itself to solve optimization problems. Such systems mitigate the hardware-software-substrate-user information losses present in every other class of MAPs and they perfect alignment between computing problems and computing mediums eliminating any technology lottery. We offer concrete steps toward early ''Physical Computing (PC) -MAP'' advances and the longer term cyber-physical R&D which we expect to introduce a new era of innovative collaboration between materials researchers and computer scientists.

An important problem in microrobotics is how to control a large group of microrobots with a global control signal. This paper focuses on controlling a large-scale swarm of MicroStressBots with on-board physical finite-state machines. We introduce the concept of group-based control, which makes it possible to scale up the swarm size while reducing the complexity both of robot fabrication as well as swarm control. We prove that the group-based control system is locally accessible in terms of the robot positions. We further hypothesize based on extensive simulations that the system is globally controllable. A nonlinear optimization strategy is proposed to control the swarm by minimizing control effort. We also propose a probabilistically complete collision avoidance method that is suitable for online use. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the proposed methods in simulations.

Recently, as the demand for cleaning robots has steadily increased, therefore household electricity consumption is also increasing. To solve this electricity consumption issue, the problem of efficient path planning for cleaning robot has become important and many studies have been conducted. However, most of them are about moving along a simple path segment, not about the whole path to clean all places. As the emerging deep learning technique, reinforcement learning (RL) has been adopted for cleaning robot. However, the models for RL operate only in a specific cleaning environment, not the various cleaning environment. The problem is that the models have to retrain whenever the cleaning environment changes. To solve this problem, the proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm is combined with an efficient path planning that operates in various cleaning environments, using transfer learning (TL), detection nearest cleaned tile, reward shaping, and making elite set methods. The proposed method is validated with an ablation study and comparison with conventional methods such as random and zigzag. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves improved training performance and increased convergence speed over the original PPO. And it also demonstrates that this proposed method is better performance than conventional methods (random, zigzag).

A multi-robot system (MRS) is a group of coordinated robots designed to cooperate with each other and accomplish given tasks. Due to the uncertainties in operating environments, the system may encounter emergencies, such as unobserved obstacles, moving vehicles, and extreme weather. Animal groups such as bee colonies initiate collective emergency reaction behaviors such as bypassing obstacles and avoiding predators, similar to muscle-conditioned reflex which organizes local muscles to avoid hazards in the first response without delaying passage through the brain. Inspired by this, we develop a similar collective conditioned reflex mechanism for multi-robot systems to respond to emergencies. In this study, Collective Conditioned Reflex (CCR), a bio-inspired emergency reaction mechanism, is developed based on animal collective behavior analysis and multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). The algorithm uses a physical model to determine if the robots are experiencing an emergency; then, rewards for robots involved in the emergency are augmented with corresponding heuristic rewards, which evaluate emergency magnitudes and consequences and decide local robots' participation. CCR is validated on three typical emergency scenarios: \textit{turbulence, strong wind, and hidden obstacle}. Simulation results demonstrate that CCR improves robot teams' emergency reaction capability with faster reaction speed and safer trajectory adjustment compared with baseline methods.

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This paper introduces the correlated arc orienteering problem (CAOP), where the task is to find routes for a team of robots to maximize the collection of rewards associated with features in the environment. These features can be one-dimensional or points in the environment, and can have spatial correlation, i.e., visiting a feature in the environment may provide a portion of the reward associated with a correlated feature. A robot incurs costs as it traverses the environment, and the total cost for its route is limited by a resource constraint such as battery life or operation time. As environments are often large, we permit multiple depots where the robots must start and end their routes. The CAOP generalizes the correlated orienteering problem (COP), where the rewards are only associated with point features, and the arc orienteering problem (AOP), where the rewards are not spatially correlated. We formulate a mixed integer quadratic program (MIQP) that formalizes the problem and gives optimal solutions. However, the problem is NP-hard, and therefore we develop an efficient greedy constructive algorithm. We illustrate the problem with two different applications: informative path planning for methane gas leak detection and coverage of road networks.

Modern computational science and engineering applications are being improved by the advances in scientific machine learning. Data-driven methods such as Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) can extract coherent structures from spatio-temporal data generated from dynamical systems and infer different scenarios for said systems. The spatio-temporal data comes as snapshots containing spatial information for each time instant. In modern engineering applications, the generation of high-dimensional snapshots can be time and/or resource-demanding. In the present study, we consider two strategies for enhancing DMD workflow in large numerical simulations: (i) snapshots compression to relieve disk pressure; (ii) the use of in situ visualization images to reconstruct the dynamics (or part of) in runtime. We evaluate our approaches with two 3D fluid dynamics simulations and consider DMD to reconstruct the solutions. Results reveal that snapshot compression considerably reduces the required disk space. We have observed that lossy compression reduces storage by almost $50\%$ with low relative errors in the signal reconstructions and other quantities of interest. We also extend our analysis to data generated on-the-fly, using in-situ visualization tools to generate image files of our state vectors during runtime. On large simulations, the generation of snapshots may be slow enough to use batch algorithms for inference. Streaming DMD takes advantage of the incremental SVD algorithm and updates the modes with the arrival of each new snapshot. We use streaming DMD to reconstruct the dynamics from in-situ generated images. We show that this process is efficient, and the reconstructed dynamics are accurate.

GANs generate new designs from an existing dataset utilizing a generator and a discriminator which are usually Deep Generative design has been growing across the Neural Networks (DNNs). The objective function of GANs design community as a viable method for design should be differentiable to utilize gradient-based optimization space exploration. Thermal design is more complex while reward of a deep RL can be defined based on the than mechanical or aerodynamic design because design requirements (Chen & Ahmed, 2021b). of the additional convection-diffusion equation and its pertinent boundary interaction. We Shape and Topology Optimization (TO) play a major role in present a generative thermal design using cooperative Generative models in engineering design (Chen & Ahmed, multi-agent deep reinforcement learning 2021a). Engineering design often require Finite Element and continuous geometric representation of the Analysis (FEA) or Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) fluid and solid domain. The proposed framework to assess the performance of the output design (Hoyer et al., consists of a pre-trained neural network surrogate 2019). These numerical approaches are computationally model as an environment to predict heat transfer expensive and require human expertise (Regenwetter et al., and pressure drop of the generated geometries.

In this paper, we present a decentralized control approach based on a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) method that employs barrier certificates for safe navigation of multiple nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots in unknown environments with static and/or dynamic obstacles. This method incorporates a Learned Barrier Function (LBF) into the NMPC design in order to guarantee safe robot navigation, i.e., prevent robot collisions with other robots and the obstacles. We refer to our proposed control approach as NMPC-LBF. Since each robot does not have a priori knowledge about the obstacles and other robots, we use a Deep Neural Network (DeepNN) running in real-time on each robot to learn the Barrier Function (BF) only from the robot's LiDAR and odometry measurements. The DeepNN is trained to learn the BF that separates safe and unsafe regions. We implemented our proposed method on simulated and actual Turtlebot3 Burger robot(s) in different scenarios. The implementation results show the effectiveness of the NMPC-LBF method at ensuring safe navigation of the robots.

Networked control systems are feedback control systems with system components distributed at different locations connected through a communication network. Since the communication network is carried out through the internet and there are bandwidth and packet size limitations, network constraints appear. Some of these constraints are time delay and packet loss. These network limitations can degrade the performance and even destabilize the system. To overcome the adverse effect of these communication constraints, various approaches have been developed, among which a representative one is networked predictive control. This approach proposes a controller, which compensates for the network time delay and packet loss actively. This paper aims at implementing a networked predictive control system for controlling a robot arm through a computer network. The network delay is accounted for by a predictor, while the potential of packet loss is mitigated using redundant control packets. The results will show the stability of the system despite a high delay and a considerable packet loss. Additionally, improvements to previous networked predictive control systems will be suggested and an increase in performance can be shown. Lastly, the effects of different system and environment parameters on the control loop will be investigated.