End to End Control of a Cloud-Based Heterogeneous Swarm for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems have been studied for many years now, however a majority of the research has been focused on particular subsystems of the cyber-physical system. Less frequently researched is the end to end control of a cyber-physical system. In this research, the end to end control of a cyber-physical system consisting of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs), and a cloud infrastructure has been developed. This end to end control demonstrates how to effectively break down a cyber-physical system into smaller more manageable subsystems. The subsystems are then controlled individually and combined together by utilizing cloud and edge computing as the high-level orchestration that connects all of the subsystems together, and makes the system scalable and robust. The cyber-physical system has been tested in various software simulations, and hardware experiments to verify its effectiveness.