Coordination of passive systems under quantized measurements

In this paper we investigate a passivity approach to collective coordination and synchronization problems in the presence of quantized measurements and show that coordination tasks can be achieved in a practical sense for a large class of passive systems.Comment: 40 pages, 1 figure, submitted to journal, second round of revie

Estimation and control with limited information and unreliable feedback

Advancement in sensing technology is introducing new sensors that can provide information that was not available before. This creates many opportunities for the development of new control systems. However, the measurements provided by these sensors may not follow the classical assumptions from the control literature. As a result, standard control tools fail to maximize the performance in control systems utilizing these new sensors. In this work we formulate new assumptions on the measurements applicable to new sensing capabilities, and develop and analyze control tools that perform better than the standard tools under these assumptions. Specifically, we make the assumption that the measurements are quantized. This assumption is applicable, for example, to low resolution sensors, remote sensing using limited bandwidth communication links, and vision-based control. We also make the assumption that some of the measurements may be faulty. This assumption is applicable to advanced sensors such as GPS and video surveillance, as well as to remote sensing using unreliable communication links. The first tool that we develop is a dynamic quantization scheme that makes a control system stable to any bounded disturbance using the minimum number of quantization regions. Both full state feedback and output feedback are considered, as well as nonlinear systems. We further show that our approach remains stable under modeling errors and delays. The main analysis tool we use for proving these results is the nonlinear input-to-state stability property. The second tool that we analyze is the Minimum Sum of Distances estimator that is robust to faulty measurements. We prove that this robustness is maintained when the measurements are also corrupted by noise, and that the estimate is stable with respect to such noise. We also develop an algorithm to compute the maximum number of faulty measurements that this estimator is robust to. The last tool we consider is motivated by vision-based control systems. We use a nonlinear optimization that is taking place over both the model parameters and the state of the plant in order to estimate these quantities. Using the example of an automatic landing controller, we demonstrate the improvement in performance attainable with such a tool

Lazy global feedbacks for quantized nonlinear event systems

We consider nonlinear event systems with quantized state information and design a globally stabilizing controller from which only the minimal required number of control value changes along the feedback trajectory to a given initial condition is transmitted to the plant. In addition, we present a non-optimal heuristic approach which might reduce the number of control value changes and requires a lower computational effort. The constructions are illustrated by two numerical examples

Event-Driven Optimal Feedback Control for Multi-Antenna Beamforming

Transmit beamforming is a simple multi-antenna technique for increasing throughput and the transmission range of a wireless communication system. The required feedback of channel state information (CSI) can potentially result in excessive overhead especially for high mobility or many antennas. This work concerns efficient feedback for transmit beamforming and establishes a new approach of controlling feedback for maximizing net throughput, defined as throughput minus average feedback cost. The feedback controller using a stationary policy turns CSI feedback on/off according to the system state that comprises the channel state and transmit beamformer. Assuming channel isotropy and Markovity, the controller's state reduces to two scalars. This allows the optimal control policy to be efficiently computed using dynamic programming. Consider the perfect feedback channel free of error, where each feedback instant pays a fixed price. The corresponding optimal feedback control policy is proved to be of the threshold type. This result holds regardless of whether the controller's state space is discretized or continuous. Under the threshold-type policy, feedback is performed whenever a state variable indicating the accuracy of transmit CSI is below a threshold, which varies with channel power. The practical finite-rate feedback channel is also considered. The optimal policy for quantized feedback is proved to be also of the threshold type. The effect of CSI quantization is shown to be equivalent to an increment on the feedback price. Moreover, the increment is upper bounded by the expected logarithm of one minus the quantization error. Finally, simulation shows that feedback control increases net throughput of the conventional periodic feedback by up to 0.5 bit/s/Hz without requiring additional bandwidth or antennas.Comment: 29 pages; submitted for publicatio

Stability of quantized time-delay nonlinear systems: A Lyapunov-Krasowskii-functional approach

Lyapunov-Krasowskii functionals are used to design quantized control laws for nonlinear continuous-time systems in the presence of constant delays in the input. The quantized control law is implemented via hysteresis to prevent chattering. Under appropriate conditions, our analysis applies to stabilizable nonlinear systems for any value of the quantization density. The resulting quantized feedback is parametrized with respect to the quantization density. Moreover, the maximal allowable delay tolerated by the system is characterized as a function of the quantization density.Comment: 31 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Mathematics of Control, Signals, and System

Recent advances on filtering and control for nonlinear stochastic complex systems with incomplete information: A survey

This Article is provided by the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund - Copyright @ 2012 Hindawi PublishingSome recent advances on the filtering and control problems for nonlinear stochastic complex systems with incomplete information are surveyed. The incomplete information under consideration mainly includes missing measurements, randomly varying sensor delays, signal quantization, sensor saturations, and signal sampling. With such incomplete information, the developments on various filtering and control issues are reviewed in great detail. In particular, the addressed nonlinear stochastic complex systems are so comprehensive that they include conventional nonlinear stochastic systems, different kinds of complex networks, and a large class of sensor networks. The corresponding filtering and control technologies for such nonlinear stochastic complex systems are then discussed. Subsequently, some latest results on the filtering and control problems for the complex systems with incomplete information are given. Finally, conclusions are drawn and several possible future research directions are pointed out.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant nos. 61134009, 61104125, 61028008, 61174136, 60974030, and 61074129, the Qing Lan Project of Jiangsu Province of China, the Project sponsored by SRF for ROCS of SEM of China, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council EPSRC of the UK under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany