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Robot design is a challenging problem involving a balance between the robot’s mechanical design, kinematic structure, and actuation and sensing capabilities. Recent work in computational robot design has focused on mechanical design while assuming that the given actuators are sufficient for the task. At the same time, existing electronics design tools ignore the physical requirements of the actuators and sensors in the circuit. In this paper, we present the first system that closes the loop between the two, incorporating a robot’s mechanical requirements into its circuit design process. We show that the problem can be solved using an iterative search consisting of two parts. First, a dynamic simulator converts the mechanical design and the given task into concrete actuation and sensing requirements. Second, a circuit generator executes a branch-and-bound search to convert the design requirements into a feasible electronic design. The system iterates through both of these steps, a process that is sometimes required since the electronics components add mass that may affect the robot’s design requirements. We demonstrate this approach on two examples — a manipulator and a quadruped — showing in both cases that the system is able to generate a valid electronics design. 

Nowadays most mobile devices are equipped with advanced sensors, enabling the measurement of information about surrounding environment or social settings. The ubiquity of mobile devices makes them the perfect platform for massive data collection, which motivates the emergence of mobile crowdsensing paradigm. However, due to the inherent noisy nature of the sensing process and the limited capability of low-cost commodity sensors, crowdsensed information tends to be less reliable compared with sensing results through dedicated sensing hardware, and multiple crowdsensing sources may conflict with each other. Thus, it is important to resolve conflicts in the collected data and discover the underlying truth. Traditional truth discovery approaches usually estimate the reliability of data sources and predict the truth value based on source reliability. However, recent data poisoning attacks greatly degrade the performance of existing truth discovery algorithms, where attackers aim to maximize the utility loss. In this paper, we investigate the data poisoning attacks on truth discovery and propose a robust approach against such attacks through additional source estimation and source filtering before data aggregation. Based on real-world data, we simulate our approach and evaluate its performance under data poisoning attacks, demonstrating the robustness of our approach.