Scaling beyond Bandwidth Limitations: Wireless Control with Stability Guarantees under Overload

ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, vol. 6, pp. 1–30

Abstract

An important class of cyber-physical systems relies on multiple agents that jointly perform a task by coordinating their actions over a wireless network. Examples include self-driving cars in intelligent transportation and production robots in smart manufacturing. However, the scalability of existing control-over-wireless solutions is limited as they cannot resolve overload situations in which the communication demand exceeds the available bandwidth. This article presents a novel co-design of distributed control and wireless communication that overcomes this limitation by dynamically allocating the available bandwidth to agents with the greatest need to communicate. Experiments on a real cyber-physical testbed with 20 agents, each consisting of a low-power wireless embedded device and a cart-pole system, demonstrate that our solution achieves significantly better control performance under overload than the state of the art. We further prove that our co-design guarantees closed-loop stability for physical systems with stochastic linear time-invariant dynamics.

Authors 5

1. Fabian Mager

   Technische Universität Dresden

   Affiliation as printed

   TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

2. Dominik Baumann Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

3. Carsten Herrmann

   Technische Universität Dresden

   Affiliation as printed

   TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

4. Sebastian Trimpe Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

5. Marco Zimmerling

   Technische Universität Dresden

   Affiliation as printed

   TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany