I-Corps: Software Platform for Constructing Mission-critical Autonomous Distributed Systems

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a wide range of autonomous distributed systems, including cloud services, internet of things (IoT) and edge-computing capable factory systems, and autonomous distributed robotics. Heavy use of cloud services, proliferation of IoT (more than 30B devices and $1.5 trillion in spending by the end of 2020) and a developing need for complex autonomous devices (e.g., drone swarms) increases the demand for concurrent and distributed software solutions and their capabilities. While standard practices of software development meet demands in a portion of these areas, due to novel requirements of complex software there is a constant rise of the burden for software developers and domain experts. There is a need to shorten the time to deploy new systems but also enable more complex systems, fortified by guarantees in crucial aspects such as security, privacy, and performance. This I-Corps project is based on the development of a general platform for constructing mission-critical autonomous distributed systems. The hypothesis is that these types of systems effectively require new models and tools for software development and ultimately user interfaces. The approach focuses on fundamental difficulties of distributed software construction and hides them from the concerns of the domain-expert (potentially non-programmer) end-user. It enables not just rapid prototyping and easier development but also construction of systems that perform a more complex sets of tasks, while producing optimal correct-by-construction systems. The goal is to empower domain-specific non-programmer experts, allowing them to focus on conceptual domain-specific tasks, while eliminating the burden of low-level distribution implementation details. The system is designed to provide a missing piece for enabling complex tasks on interconnected devices, especially the those operating under restricted environments, like autonomous drone swarms, opening new possibilities with such autonomy, such as advanced drone swarm missions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.