Co-Design of Communication, Computing, and Control in Cyber-Physical Systems

This talk traces the evolution from PhD research on online verification for connected vehicles to the development of FleetMQ, a dynamic middleware layer purpose-built for cyber-physical systems in motion. Motivated by the persistent limitations of traditional communication software stacks, FleetMQ was co-designed with compute and control in mind, enabling reliable, real-time data streaming across variable networks with minimal integration overhead. Field tests across several vehicular and robotics platforms have demonstrated promising results in both system scalability and developer usability.

The talk will share insights from these deployments and introduce upcoming features for latency estimation and observability. It will conclude by outlining where we see emerging opportunities at the intersection of communication, computing, and control in cyber-physical systems.

Frank J. Jiang is CEO and Co-Founder of FleetMQ and a postdoctoral researcher at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

FleetMQ was spun out from his PhD research on online verification and real-time control for connected and autonomous systems, with the goal of developing dynamic middleware for cyber-physical systems in motion.

Frank received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016, and his M.S. degree in Systems, Control and Robotics from KTH in 2019. He received his PhD in Decision and Control Systems from KTH earlier this year. He received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2020 IFAC Conference on Cyber-Physical-Human Systems (CPHS 2020), and his PhD project was included on the 2022 Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences 100 list of research projects with potential to create value.

Data-Driven methods in Robotics, and Foundation Models in particular, are currently among the most exciting areas of progress within robotic manipulation, but core challenges such as rigorous reasoning about data requirements and reliability remain. In this presentation, I will discuss some of our recent work on leveraging cloud robotics as a paradigm for training machine learning models for robotics and how the CloudGripper (cloudgripper.org) cloud robotics test-bed at KTH enables data-driven validation and benchmarking at scale using a set of remotely accessible robot arm cells.

Florian Pokorny is an Associate Professor of Machine Learning within the division of Robotics, Perception and Learning at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
His group is working on data-driven methods for robotic manipulation and cloud robotics.

He is currently coordinating the Horizon Europe project SoftEnable (softenable.eu) focusing on challenging robotic manipulation tasks involving soft and fragile objects and he coordinates the Swedish excellent research environment (NEST) grant "Intelligent Cloud Robotics for Real-Time Manipulation at Scale" funded by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems & Software Program (wasp-sweden.org). Previously, he spent 05/2015-04/2016 at the University of California, Berkeley working in Prof. Ken Goldberg's group and was also a researcher and postdoc at KTH. He obtained his PhD in mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and holds a BSc mathematics from the University of Edinburgh and a Master of Advanced Study in Mathematics (Part III) from the University of Cambridge.

Inspired by the fast evolution of emerging digital technologies such as Internet of Things, 5G, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, the manufacturing industry are calling for new generation industrial automation systems that can be deployed on open, flexible, and IT-style communication and computing infrastructures. To fulfill this demand, we have proposed the new paradigm of Cloud Fog Automation. However, major technical challenges in the three “C” subjects, i.e., communication, computing, and control, must be solved before the expected benefits are achievable, especially in the time-critical control that requires stringent determinism and functional safety. In the past decades, these challenges had been addressed separately in the three subjects but without success, unfortunately. From now on, we believe cross-disciplinary research, or so-called Control -Computing- Communication (3C) Co-Design, will be the most promising strategy to realize Cloud Fog Automation. 

In this presentation, I will share some examples of the 3C Co-Design we have done. In the first example, significant improvement in the overall control performance is achieved by adjusting the control model according to the latency pattern of communication and computing infrastructure. In another example, the probability of system safe-stop due to communication error is significantly reduced by the so-called joint error detection and correction (JEDeC) which applies the GRAND decoding to the cyclic redundancy checking (CRC) codes in the functional safety communication layer. I will also introduce some future research directions through the examples of ongoing projects.

Dr. Zhibo Pang is a Member of IEEE IES Industry Activities Committee, Chair of the IEEE TC on Cloud and Wireless Systems for Industrial Applications, and Co-Chair of the TC on Industrial Informatics. He is Associate Editor of IEEE TII, IEEE JBHI, and IEEE JESTIE. He was awarded the “Inventor of the Year Award” by ABB Corporate Research Sweden, three times in 2016, 2018, and 2021 respectively. He works on enabling technologies in electronics, communication, computing, control, artificial intelligence, and robotics for Industry4.0 and Healthcare4.0.

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This talk explores key technical challenges and recent advances in task-oriented and semantics-aware communications for wireless networks. The presentation is structured in two main parts.

In the first part, we introduce the motivation behind semantics-aware, goal-oriented communication paradigms and review existing approaches, including early studies on the age and value of information. We then move beyond these traditional metrics to address emerging needs in real-time remote tracking, actuation, and autonomous systems.

The second part presents recent results that illustrate the role of semantics and task relevance in optimizing communication strategies for such systems. We conclude with a discussion on research directions.

Nikolaos Pappas (Senior Member, IEEE) received the first B.Sc. degree in computer science, the second B.Sc. degree in mathematics, the M.Sc. degree in computer science, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Crete, Greece, in 2005, 2012, 2007, and 2012, respectively. From 2005 to 2012, he was a Graduate Research Assistant with the Telecommunications and Networks Laboratory, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology–Hellas, Heraklion, Greece; and a Visiting Scholar with the Institute of Systems Research, University of Maryland at College Park, College Park, MD, USA. From 2012 to 2014, he was a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the Department of Telecommunications, CentraleSupec, France.

He is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden. His main research interests include the field of wireless communication networks, with an emphasis on semantics-aware communications, energy harvesting networks, network-level cooperation, age of information, and stochastic geometry.

He has served as the Symposium Co-Chair for the IEEE International Conference on Communications in 2022. He was the general chair for the 23rd International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2025).  He is an Area Editor of the IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society and an Expert Editor of invited papers of the IEEE Communications Letters. He is Associate Editor for four IEEE Transactions journals.

Driven by the demand for increasing compute performance and enabled by advances in connectivity, real-time and safety-critical workloads extend from embedded devices towards the cloud. Such reliable distributed systems show benefits in scalability and flexibility (e.g., easier upgrades throughout device lifetimes) while simultaneously targeting reduced power consumption on the device level. Key application domains include mobility, home appliances, and industrial automation. Significant design challenges encompass managing the inherent complexity of such distributed systems, mitigating the impact of potentially unreliable networks and compute components, and effectively trading off compute and communication resources while fulfilling control performance requirements.

Dirk Ziegenbein is Chief Expert for cyber-physical systems engineering and leads a research cluster developing methods and technologies for dynamic distributed systems at Bosch Research in Stuttgart, Germany. Dirk received a Master’s degree from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. from Technical University of Braunschweig for his dissertation on modeling and design of embedded systems. He held several positions in R&D (software component technology, scheduling analysis, software architectures for multi-cores, autonomous systems design) and product management (embedded software engineering tools). Additionally, Dirk serves on the ITEA Board and in various program committees of international top conferences including DAC, DATE, ECRTS, and RTAS.

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