This paper describes a testbed for development, deployment, testing, and analysis of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) applications. The testbed incorporates smart network hardware, allowing high-fidelity emulation of CPS network characteristics, and CPS simulation environments to enable high-frequency sensor reading, actuator control and physical environmental changes. We discuss the architecture of this testbed and present the types of experiments and applications which can be run to study hardware and software fault tolerance, software reconfiguration, and system stability characteristics in distributed real-time embedded systems. We also describe the scalability, limitations, and potential extensions to this testbed.

This paper presents ROSMOD, a model-driven component-based development tool suite for the Robot Operating System (ROS). ROSMOD is well suited for the design, development and deployment of large scale distributed applications on embedded hardware devices. We present the various features of ROSMOD including the modeling language, the graphical user interface, code generators and deployment infrastructure. We describe the utility of this tool with a real-world case study - An Autonomous Ground Support Equipment (AGSE) robot that was designed and prototyped using ROSMOD for the NASA Student Launch competition, 2014-2015.

Mobile clouds such as network-connected vehicles and satellite clusters are an emerging class of systems that are extensions to traditional real-time embedded systems: they provide long-term mission platforms made up of dynamic clusters of heterogeneous hardware nodes communicating over ad hoc wireless networks. Besides the inherent complexities entailed by a distributed architecture, developing software and testing these systems is difficult due to a number of other reasons, including the mobile nature of such systems, which can require a model of the physical dynamics of the system for accurate simulation and testing. This paper describes a rapid development and testing framework for a distributed satellite system. Our solutions include a modeling language for configuring and specifying an application's interaction with the middleware layer, a physics simulator integrated with hardware in the loop to provide the system's physical dynamics and the integration of a network traffic tool to dynamically vary the network bandwidth based on the physical dynamics.