The wireless control network: A new approach for control over networks
Abstract
We present a method to stabilize a plant with a network of resource constrained wireless
nodes. As opposed to traditional networked control schemes where the nodes simply
route information to and from a dedicated controller (perhaps performing some encoding
along the way), our approach treats the network itself as the controller. Specifically,
we formulate a strategy for each node in the network to follow, where at each time-step,
each node updates its internal state to be a linear combination of the states of the
nodes in its neighborhood. We show that this causes the entire network to behave as
a linear dynamical system, with sparsity constraints imposed by the network topology.
We provide a numerical design procedure to determine appropriate linear combinations
to be applied by each node so that the transmissions of the nodes closest to the actuators
will stabilize the plant. We also show how our design procedure can be modified to
maintain mean square stability under packet drops in the network, and present a distributed
scheme that can handle node failures while preserving stability. We call this architecture
a Wireless Control Network, and show that it introduces very low computational and
communication overhead to the nodes in the network, allows the use of simple transmission
scheduling algorithms, and enables compositional design (where the existing wireless
control infrastructure can be easily extended to handle new plants that are brought
online in the vicinity of the network). © 2011 IEEE.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/11284Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1109/TAC.2011.2163864Publication Info
Pajic, M; Sundaram, S; Pappas, GJ; & Mangharam, R (2011). The wireless control network: A new approach for control over networks. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 56(10). pp. 2305-2318. 10.1109/TAC.2011.2163864. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/11284.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Miroslav Pajic
Dickinson Family Associate Professor
Miroslav Pajic's research focuses on design and analysis of cyber-physical systems
with varying levels of autonomy and human interaction, at the intersection of (more
traditional) areas of embedded systems, AI, learning and controls, formal methods
and robotics.

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