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 paper 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.
@article{arxiv.2104.07989,
title = {Scaling Beyond Bandwidth Limitations: Wireless Control With Stability Guarantees Under Overload},
author = {Fabian Mager and Dominik Baumann and Carsten Herrmann and Sebastian Trimpe and Marco Zimmerling},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.07989},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Accepted article to appear in ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems