Simulations play a crucial role in robotics research and education. This paper presents the OpenUAV testbed, an open-source, easy-to-use, web-based, and reproducible software system that enables students and researchers to run robotic simulations on the cloud. We have built upon our previous work and have addressed some of the educational and research challenges associated with the prior work. The critical contributions of the paper to the robotics and automation community are threefold: First, OpenUAV saves students and researchers from tedious and complicated software setups by providing web-browser-based Linux desktop sessions with standard robotics software like Gazebo, ROS, and flight autonomy stack. Second, a method for saving an individual's research work with its dependencies for the work's future reproducibility. Third, the platform provides a mechanism to support photorealistic robotics simulations by combining Unity game engine-based camera rendering and Gazebo physics. The paper addresses a research need for photorealistic simulations and describes a methodology for creating a photorealistic aquatic simulation. We also present the various academic and research use-cases of this platform to improve robotics education and research, especially during times like the COVID-19 pandemic, when virtual collaboration is necessary. GitHub https://github.com/Open-UAV/openuav-turbovnc Webpage: https://openuav.us

OpenUAV Cloud Testbed: a Collaborative Design Studio for Field Robotics

Transactive Energy (TE) is an emerging discipline that utilizes economic and control techniques for operating and managing the power grid effectively. Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) represent a fundamental shift away from traditionally centrally managed energy generation and storage to one that is rather distributed. However, integrating and managing DERs into the power grid is highly challenging owing to the TE implementation issues such as privacy, equity, efficiency, reliability, and security. The TE market structures allow utilities to transact (i.e., buy and sell) power services (production, distribution, and storage) from/to DER providers integrated as part of the grid. Flexible power pricing in TE enables power services transactions to dynamically adjust power generation and storage in a way that continuously balances power supply and demand as well as minimize cost of grid operations. Therefore, it has become important to analyze various market models utilized in different TE applications for their impact on above implementation issues.In this demo, we show-case the Transactive Energy Simulation and Analysis Toolsuite (TE-SAT) with its three publicly available design studios for experimenting with TE markets. All three design studios are built using metamodeling tool called the Web-based Graphical Modeling Environment (WebGME). Using a Git-like storage and tracking backend server, WebGME enables multi-user editing on models and experiments using simply a web-browser. This directly facilitates collaboration among different TE stakeholders for developing and analyzing grid operations and market models. Additionally, these design studios provide an integrated and scalable cloud backend for running corresponding simulation experiments.

TE-SAT: Transactive Energy Simulation and Analysis Toolsuite

The Cyber-Physical Systems Virtual Organization (CPS-VO)1 has been evolving from a shared repository of information into a destination for active collaboration, simulation, hands-on education, and demonstration. We would like to show-case advances in tool integration, particularly a set of verification tools, and how this integration enables reproducibility, improves accessibility, and lowers the barrier to entry in this field. We would also like to demonstrate use of our simulation and tool frameworks, have a poster showing results and progress over the last year, and invite others to host their tools on the CPS-VO infrastructure.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3302509.3313331

Cyber-physical systems virtual organization: Active resources: enabling reproducibility, improving accessibility, and lowering the barrier to entry

Although organizations are continuously making concerted efforts to harden their systems against network attacks by air-gapping critical systems, attackers continuously adapt and uncover covert channels to exfiltrate data from air-gapped systems. For instance, attackers have demonstrated the feasibility of exfiltrating data from a computer sitting in a Faraday cage by exfiltrating data using magnetic fields. Although a large body of work has recently emerged highlighting various physical covert channels, these attacks have mostly targeted open-loop cyber-physical systems where the covert channels exist on physical channels that are not being monitored by the victim. Network architectures such as fog computing push sensitive data to cyber-physical edge devices--whose physical side channels are typically monitored via state estimation. In this paper, we formalize covert data exfiltration that uses existing cyber-physical models and infrastructure of individual devices to exfiltrate data in a stealthy manner, i.e., we propose a method to circumvent cyber-physical state estimation intrusion detection techniques while exfiltrating sensitive data from the network. We propose a generalized model for encoding and decoding sensitive data within cyber-physical control loops. We evaluate our approach on a distributed IoT network that includes computation nodes residing on physical drones as well as on an industrial control system for the control of a robotic arm. Unlike prior works, we formalize the constraints of covert cyber-physical channel exfiltration in the presence of a defender performing state estimation.

Let's Talk Through Physics! Covert Cyber-Physical Data Exfiltration on Air-Gapped Edge Devices

It is often the case that analysis, simulation and verification tools from different sources share a lot of commonalities. Even though the syntax might differ, the semantics of the input models are many times the same. Theoretically this means that different tools could either be compared or combined to analyze different aspects of the same model. In practise however, this often leads to time-consuming manual tweaks and modifications on a per model basis. Additionally, the necessary environments, in form of run-times and dependencies required for the tools to be executed, are not always readily available. Images for virtual machines and containers surely ease the process for setting up the context, but this still requires manual plumbing when setting up a work-flow.In this demo a Design Studio for combining different verification tools is show-cased. Building on top of WebGME (Generic Modeling Environment) it provides end-users with an online, browser-based editor where models are stored in a version-controlled, centralized database. At any point of the design process, a model can at the click of a button be requested to act as input for a range of different verification tools such as SpaceEx, Flow* and dReach. The Design Studio is currently hosted at cps-vo.org, but also available as open source and the entire system can, thanks to containerization, be hosted locally with a single command. At the core of this Design Studio lies the HYbrid Source Transformer, HYST, which is hosted as an independent service for translating a common model format, SpaceEx, into each tool-specific format.

Marcus Lucas

Papers

Cyber-physical systems virtual organization: Active resources: enabling reproducibility, improving accessibility, and lowering the barrier to entry

Let's Talk Through Physics! Covert Cyber-Physical Data Exfiltration on Air-Gapped Edge Devices

Demo: a design studio for verification tools