Feedback Control Goes Wireless: Guaranteed Stability over Low-power Multi-hop Networks

2019

Conference Paper

ics

Closing feedback loops fast and over long distances is key to emerging applications; for example, robot motion control and swarm coordination require update intervals below 100 ms. Low-power wireless is preferred for its flexibility, low cost, and small form factor, especially if the devices support multi-hop communication. Thus far, however, closed-loop control over multi-hop low-power wireless has only been demonstrated for update intervals on the order of multiple seconds. This paper presents a wireless embedded system that tames imperfections impairing control performance such as jitter or packet loss, and a control design that exploits the essential properties of this system to provably guarantee closed-loop stability for linear dynamic systems. Using experiments on a testbed with multiple cart-pole systems, we are the first to demonstrate the feasibility and to assess the performance of closed-loop control and coordination over multi-hop low-power wireless for update intervals from 20 ms to 50 ms.

@inproceedings{mager18,
  title = {Feedback Control Goes Wireless: Guaranteed Stability over Low-power Multi-hop Networks},
  author = {Mager, Fabian and Baumann, Dominik and Jacob, Romain and Thiele, Lothar and Trimpe, Sebastian and Zimmerling, Marco},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems},
  pages = {97--108},
  month = apr,
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.1145/3302509.3311046},
  month_numeric = {4}
}