Research
OCC Hospital Building
The OpenCyberCity testbed at VCU features a scale model hospital building with multiple floors housing spaces designated for entry, waiting, diagnostics, triage, patient rooms, and more. An elevator shaft runs through all floors of the building. A distributed control system has been created using open-source hardware and software to promote engagement with the testbed. This system collects data from physical sensors placed in the building to collect environmental characteristics such as temperature, humidity, and motion. Small actuators are used to articulate features such as doors, windows, and the elevator. To create a robust environment for testing, the testbed will be connected digitally to VCU’s Medical Device Security testbed.
Collected ‘patient’ data can be used for analytics purposes to create programs for increasing the veracity of electronic medical records. Data passed between the Medical Device Security testbed and OpenCyberCity testbed will require keyed authentication and has a dedicated VLAN, isolated from the penetration testing and development environments.
OCC Water Distribution System
We are working on developing a Smart Water System at VCU. The aim of this on-going work is to demonstrate a smart water system that will consume less energy and optimize water consumption keeping user convenience in mind. To solve this problem, we regulated the system (pump) pressure. A PID controller will be used to keep the system pressure at a fixed setpoint. The simulation is done for six different usage patterns: One active user (1), Two users on the same floor (2-S), Two users on opposite floors (2-O), Three users with the additional two users on the same floor (3-S), Three users with the additional two users on alternative floors (3-O), and All users (4). In all the above cases, the dynamic pressure control yielded better results in terms of flow rate, pressure and power consumption than fixed pressure. The next phase of this project will be on implementing it in the OpenCyberCity testbed.
OCC Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)
The OpenCyberCity Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) integrates small scale autonomous systems, such as ground vehicles, road-side units, and small quadrotors, into a unified testbed for multi-agent robotics, smart city, and communications research. Our team developed a custom autonomy architecture built on top of the ROS2 middleware system. This system integrates inertial measurements and embedded vision processing to emulate the typical payloads on full-size experimental autonomous vehicles. The ITS communicates with OpenCyberCity’s broader MQTT-based messaging framework by bridging the ROS2 autonomy middleware. The control architecture of the ITS enables centralized or decentralized command and control of autonomous systems, which allows for different types of experiments among vehicles and the OpenCyberCity infrastructure.
