A Practical Introduction to Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical Systems

Chapter 11Human-in-the-Loop Constraints

As suggested in Chapter 2, although many of the developments we have discussed so far happened in parallel and overlapped with each other, it is quite possible to identify a certain convergence. We believe that technological progress will always revert back to its origins: the adaptation of the environment to human beings, be it an ancient terrain that became a cultivated field or a world filled with intelligent devices that work together to accommodate human needs.

Throughout this book, we have observed many limitations in the current state of the art. Several limitations are of a technical nature, requiring additional research effort in order to be overcome. However, there are also limitations of a more ethical nature that relate to the public's acceptance of these new types of technological paradigms. We dedicate this chapter to the identification of both types of limitations–technical and non-technical–which, in fact, can be looked at as lessons learned from the by now long journey we initiated with the writing of this book.

11.1 Technical Limitations

Despite all of the development in terms of base technologies, only now are we beginning to devise how sensing, state inference, and actuation can be combined together in HiTLCPSs, as evidenced by the research projects described in Sections 4.1 and 4.2. In general, most of these projects still assume architectures within environments that are well known and static. We believe that future ...