Design, Implementation and Validation of Resource-Aware and Resilient Wireless Networked Control Systems

Abstract: Networked control over wireless networks is of growing importance in many application domains such as industrial control, building automation and transportation systems. Wide deployment however, requires systematic design tools to enable efficient resource usage while guaranteeing close-loop control performance. The control system may be greatly affected by the inherent imperfections and limitations of the wireless medium and malfunction of system components. In this thesis, we make five important contributions that address these issues. In the first contribution, we consider event- and self-triggered control and investigate how to efficiently tune and execute these paradigms for appropriate control performance. Communication strategies for aperiodic control are devised, where we jointly address the selection of medium-access control and scheduling policies. Experimental results show that the best trade-off is obtained by a hybrid scheme, combining event- and self-triggered control together with contention-based and contention-free medium access control.The second contribution proposes an event-based method to select between fast and slow periodic sampling rates. The approach is based on linear quadratic control and the event condition is a quadratic function of the system state. Numerical and experimental results show that this hybrid controller is able to reduce the average sampling rate in comparison to a traditional periodic controller, while achieving the same closed-loop control performance.In the third contribution, we develop compensation methods for out-of-order communications and time-varying delays using a game-theoretic minimax control framework. We devise a linear temporal coding strategy where the sensor combines the current and previous measurements into a single packet to be transmitted. An experimental evaluation is performed in a multi-hop networked control scenario with a routing layer vulnerability exploited by a malicious application. The experimental and numerical results show the advantages of the proposed compensation schemes.The fourth contribution proposes a distributed reconfiguration method for sensor and actuator networks. We consider systems where sensors and actuators cooperate to recover from faults. Reconfiguration is performed to achieve model-matching, while minimizing the steady-state estimation error covariance and a linear quadratic control cost. The reconfiguration scheme is implemented in a room heating testbed, and experimental results demonstrate the method's ability to automatically reconfigure the faulty system in a distributed and fast manner.The final contribution is a co-simulator, which combines the control system simulator Simulink with the wireless network simulator COOJA. The co-simulator integrates physical plant dynamics with realistic wireless network models and the actual embedded software running on the networked devices. Hence, it allows for the validation of the complete wireless networked control system, including the study of the interactions between software and hardware components.