Men and women in California put their lives on the line when battling wildfires every year, but there is a future where machines powered by artificial intelligence are on the front lines, not firefighters.

However, this new generation of self-thinking robots would need security protocols to ensure they aren’t susceptible to hackers. To integrate such robots into society, they must come with assurances that they will behave safely around humans.

It begs the question: can you guarantee the safety of something that doesn’t exist yet? It’s something Assistant Professor Glen Chou hopes to accomplish by developing algorithms that will enable autonomous systems to learn and adapt while acting with safety and security assurances. 

He plans to launch research initiatives, in collaboration with the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, to secure this new technological frontier as it develops. 

“To operate in uncertain real-world environments, robots and other autonomous systems need to leverage and adapt a complex network of perception and control algorithms to turn sensor data into actions,” he said. “To obtain realistic assurances, we must do a joint safety and security analysis on these sensors and algorithms simultaneously, rather than one at a time.”

This end-to-end method would proactively look for flaws in the robot’s systems rather than wait for them to be exploited. This would lead to intrinsically robust robotic systems that can recover from failures.

Chou said this research will be useful in other domains, including advanced space exploration. If a space rover is sent to one of Saturn’s moons, for example, it needs to be able to act and think independently of scientists on Earth. 

Aside from fighting fires and exploring space, this technology could perform maintenance in nuclear reactors, automatically maintain the power grid, and make autonomous surgery safer. It could also bring assistive robots into the home, enabling higher standards of care. 

This is a challenging domain where safety, security, and privacy concerns are paramount due to frequent, close contact with humans.

This will start in the newly established Trustworthy Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, which Chou directs. He and his Ph.D. students will design principled algorithms that enable general-purpose robots and autonomous systems to operate capably, safely, and securely with humans while remaining resilient to real-world failures and uncertainty.

Chou earned dual bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer sciences as well as mechanical engineering from University of California Berkeley in 2017, a master’s and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Michigan in 2019 and 2022, respectively. He was a postdoc at MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory prior to joining Georgia Tech in November 2024. He is a recipient of the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate fellowship program, NSF Graduate Research fellowships, and was named a Robotics: Science and Systems Pioneer in 2022.

Georgia Tech is developing a new artificial intelligence (AI) based method to automatically find and stop threats to renewable energy and local generators for energy customers across the nation’s power grid.

The research will concentrate on protecting distributed energy resources (DER), which are most often used on low-voltage portions of the power grid. They can include rooftop solar panels, controllable electric vehicle chargers, and battery storage systems. 

The cybersecurity concern is that an attacker could compromise these systems and use them to cause problems across the electrical grid like, overloading components and voltage fluctuations. These issues are a national security risk and could cause massive customer disruptions through blackouts and equipment damage. 

“Cyber-physical critical infrastructures provide us with core societal functionalities and services such as electricity,” said Saman Zonouz, Georgia Tech associate professor and lead researcher for the project. 

“Our multi-disciplinary solution, DerGuard, will leverage device-level cybersecurity, system-wide analysis, and AI techniques for automated vulnerability assessment, discovery, and mitigation in power grids with emerging renewable energy resources.”

The project’s long-term outcome will be a secure, AI-enabled power grid solution that can search and protect the DER’s on its network from cyberattacks. 

“First, we will identify sets of critical DERs that, if compromised, would allow the attacker to cause the most trouble for the power grid,” said Daniel Molzahn, assistant professor at Georgia Tech. 

“These DERs would then be prioritized for analysis and patching any identified cyber problems. Identifying the critical sets of DERs would require information about the DERs themselves- like size or location- and the power grid. This way, the utility company or other aggregator would be in the best position to use this tool.”

Additionally, the team will establish a testbed with industry partners. They will then develop and evaluate technology applications to better understand the behavior between people, devices, and network performance.

Along with Zonouz and Molzahn, Georgia Tech faculty Wenke Lee, professor, and John P. Imlay Jr. chair in software, will also lead the team of researchers from across the country. 

The researchers are collaborating with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab, the Idaho National Labs, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, and Fortiphyd Logic. Industry partners Network Perception, Siemens, and PSE&G will advise the researchers. 

The work will be carried out at Georgia Tech’s Cyber-Physical Security Lab (CPSec) within the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). 

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a $45 million investment at the end of February for 16 cybersecurity initiatives. The projects will identify new cybersecurity tools and technologies designed to reduce cyber risks for energy infrastructure followed by tech-transfer initiatives. The DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) awarded $4.2 million for the Institute’s DerGuard project.