Event-Based Control and Estimation with Stochastic Disturbances

This thesis deals with event-based control and estimation strategies, motivated by certain bottlenecks in the control loop. Two kinds of implementation constraints are considered: closing one or several control loops over a data network, and sensors that report measurements only as intervals (e.g. with quantization). The proposed strategies depend critically on _events_, when a data packet is sent or when a change in the measurement signal is received. The value of events is that they communicate new information about stochastic process disturbances. A data network in the control loop imposes constraints on the event timing, modelled as a minimum time between packets. A thresholdbased control strategy is suggested and shown to be optimal for firstorder systems with impulse control. Different ways to find the optimal threshold are investigated for single and multiple control loops sharing one network. The major gain compared to linear time invariant (LTI) control is with a single loop a greatly reduced communication rate, which with multiple loops can be traded for a similarly reduced regulation error. With the bottleneck that sensors report only intervals, both the theoretical and practical control problems become more complex. We focus on the estimation problem, where the optimal solution is known but untractable. Two simplifications are explored to find a realistic state estimator: reformulation to a mixed stochastic/worst case scenario and joint maximum a posteriori estimation. The latter approach is simplified and evaluated experimentally on a moving cart with quantized position measurements controlled by a low-end microcontroller. The examples considered demonstrate that event-based control considerably outperforms LTI control, when the bottleneck addressed is a genuine performance constraint on the latter

Synthesis of Minimal Error Control Software

Software implementations of controllers for physical systems are at the core of many embedded systems. The design of controllers uses the theory of dynamical systems to construct a mathematical control law that ensures that the controlled system has certain properties, such as asymptotic convergence to an equilibrium point, while optimizing some performance criteria. However, owing to quantization errors arising from the use of fixed-point arithmetic, the implementation of this control law can only guarantee practical stability: under the actions of the implementation, the trajectories of the controlled system converge to a bounded set around the equilibrium point, and the size of the bounded set is proportional to the error in the implementation. The problem of verifying whether a controller implementation achieves practical stability for a given bounded set has been studied before. In this paper, we change the emphasis from verification to automatic synthesis. Using synthesis, the need for formal verification can be considerably reduced thereby reducing the design time as well as design cost of embedded control software. We give a methodology and a tool to synthesize embedded control software that is Pareto optimal w.r.t. both performance criteria and practical stability regions. Our technique is a combination of static analysis to estimate quantization errors for specific controller implementations and stochastic local search over the space of possible controllers using particle swarm optimization. The effectiveness of our technique is illustrated using examples of various standard control systems: in most examples, we achieve controllers with close LQR-LQG performance but with implementation errors, hence regions of practical stability, several times as small.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figure

Quasilinear Control of Systems with Time-Delays and Nonlinear Actuators and Sensors

This thesis investigates Quasilinear Control (QLC) of time-delay systems with nonlinear actuators and sensors and analyzes the accuracy of stochastic linearization for these systems. QLC leverages the method of stochastic linearization to replace each nonlinearity with an equivalent gain, which is obtained by solving a transcendental equation. The idea of QLC is to stochastically linearize the system in order to analyze and design controllers using classical linear control theory. In this thesis, the existence of the equivalent gain for a closed-loop time-delay system is discussed. To compute the equivalent gain, two methods are explored. The first method uses an explicit but complex algorithm based on delay Lyapunov equation to study the time-delay, while the second method uses Pade approximant. It is shown that, under a suitable criterion, Pade approximant can be effectively applied for QLC of time-delay systems. Furthermore, the method of Saturated-Root Locus (S-RL) is extended to nonlinear time-delay systems. It turns out that, in a time-delay system, S-RL always terminates prematurely as opposed to a delay-free system, which may or may not terminate prematurely. Statistical experiments are performed to investigate the accuracy of stochastic linearization compared to a system without time-delay. The impact of increasing the time-delay in the approach of stochastic linearization is also investigated. Results show that stochastic linearization effectively linearizes a nonlinear time-delay system, even though delays generally degrade accuracy. Overall, the accuracy remains relatively high over the selected parameters. Finally, this approach is applied to pitch control in a wind turbine system as a practical example of a nonlinear time-delay system, and its performance is analyzed to demonstrate the efficacy of the approach

Tracking an Auto-Regressive Process with Limited Communication per Unit Time

Samples from a high-dimensional AR[1] process are observed by a sender which can communicate only finitely many bits per unit time to a receiver. The receiver seeks to form an estimate of the process value at every time instant in real-time. We consider a time-slotted communication model in a slow-sampling regime where multiple communication slots occur between two sampling instants. We propose a successive update scheme which uses communication between sampling instants to refine estimates of the latest sample and study the following question: Is it better to collect communication of multiple slots to send better refined estimates, making the receiver wait more for every refinement, or to be fast but loose and send new information in every communication opportunity? We show that the fast but loose successive update scheme with ideal spherical codes is universally optimal asymptotically for a large dimension. However, most practical quantization codes for fixed dimensions do not meet the ideal performance required for this optimality, and they typically will have a bias in the form of a fixed additive error. Interestingly, our analysis shows that the fast but loose scheme is not an optimal choice in the presence of such errors, and a judiciously chosen frequency of updates outperforms it

Finite-rate control : stability and performance

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-91).The classical control paradigm addressed problems where communication between one plant and one controller is essentially perfect, and both have either discrete or continuous dynamics. Today, new problems in control over networks are emerging. A complex network involves an interconnection of numerous computational components where the controllers may be decentralized, and the components can have discrete or continuous dynamics. Communication links can be very noisy, induce delays, and have finite-rate constraints. Applications include remote navigation systems over the internet (eg. telesurgery) or in constrained environments (eg. deep sea/Mars exploration). These complexities demand that control be integrated with the protocols of communication to ensure stability and performance. Control over networks is recent and continues to receive growing interest. Initial work has focused on asymptotic stability under finite-rate feedback control, where the only excitation to the system is an unknown (but bounded) finite-dimensional initial condition vector. Such problems reduce to state-estimation under finite-rate constraints.(cont.) More recently, disturbance rejection limitations were derived for the same setting, assuming stochastic exogenous signals entering the system. Although these studies have contributed greatly to our understanding of such systems, input-output stability, performance analysis, and synthesis of coding schemes and controllers under finite-rate constraints remains largely untapped. In this thesis we address how finiterate control impacts input-output stability and performance, and we also construct computable methods for synthesizing controllers and coding schemes to meet control objectives. We first investigate how finite-rate feedback limits input-output stability and closed-loop performance. We assume that exogenous inputs belong to rich deterministic classes of signals, and perform analyses in a worst case setting. Since our results are derived using a robust control perspective, we are able to translate performance demands into optimization problems that can be solved to obtain quantization strategies and controllers in a streamlined manner. We then study how finite-rate feedforward control impacts finite-horizon tracking and navigation.(cont.) We derive performance limitations for each case, and illustrate time and performance tradeoffs. Finally, we investigate feedforward control over noisy discrete channels, and solve a decentralized distributed design problem involving the simultaneous synthesis of a block coding strategy and a single-input single-output linear time-invariant controller. We also illustrate delay versus accuracy tradeoffs.by Sridevi Vedula Sarma.Ph.D

Networked Control System Design and Parameter Estimation

Networked control systems (NCSs) are a kind of distributed control systems in which the data between control components are exchanged via communication networks. Because of the attractive advantages of NCSs such as reduced system wiring, low weight, and ease of system diagnosis and maintenance, the research on NCSs has received much attention in recent years. The first part (Chapter 2 - Chapter 4) of the thesis is devoted to designing new controllers for NCSs by incorporating the network-induced delays. The thesis also conducts research on filtering of multirate systems and identification of Hammerstein systems in the second part (Chapter 5 - Chapter 6). Network-induced delays exist in both sensor-to-controller (S-C) and controller-to-actuator (C-A) links. A novel two-mode-dependent control scheme is proposed, in which the to-be-designed controller depends on both S-C and C-A delays. The resulting closed-loop system is a special jump linear system. Then, the conditions for stochastic stability are obtained in terms of a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) with nonconvex constraints, which can be efficiently solved by a sequential LMI optimization algorithm. Further, the control synthesis problem for the NCSs is considered. The definitions of H₂ and H∞ norms for the special system are first proposed. Also, the plant uncertainties are considered in the design. Finally, the robust mixed H₂/H∞ control problem is solved under the framework of LMIs. To compensate for both S-C and C-A delays modeled by Markov chains, the generalized predictive control method is modified to choose certain predicted future control signal as the current control effort on the actuator node, whenever the control signal is delayed. Further, stability criteria in terms of LMIs are provided to check the system stability. The proposed method is also tested on an experimental hydraulic position control system. Multirate systems exist in many practical applications where different sampling rates co-exist in the same system. The l₂-l∞ filtering problem for multirate systems is considered in the thesis. By using the lifting technique, the system is first transformed to a linear time-invariant one, and then the filter design is formulated as an optimization problem which can be solved by using LMI techniques. Hammerstein model consists of a static nonlinear block followed in series by a linear dynamic system, which can find many applications in different areas. New switching sequences to handle the two-segment nonlinearities are proposed in this thesis. This leads to less parameters to be estimated and thus reduces the computational cost. Further, a stochastic gradient algorithm based on the idea of replacing the unmeasurable terms with their estimates is developed to identify the Hammerstein model with two-segment nonlinearities. Finally, several open problems are listed as the future research directions

Variance-constrained state estimation for networked multi-rate systems with measurement quantization and probabilistic sensor failures

This paper is concerned with the variance-constrained state estimation problem for a class of networked multi-rate systems (NMSs) with network-induced probabilistic sensor failures and measurement quantization. The stochastic characteristics of the sensor failures are governed by mutually independent random variables over the interval [0,1]. By applying the lifting technique, an augmented system model is established to facilitate the state estimation of the underlying NMSs. With the aid of the stochastic analysis approach, sufficient conditions are derived under which the exponential mean-square stability of the augmented system is guaranteed, the prescribed H∞ performance constraint is achieved, and the individual variance constraint on the steady-state estimation error is satisfied. Based on the derived conditions, the addressed variance-constrained state estimation problem of NMSs is recast as a convex optimization one that can be solved via the semi-definite program method. Furthermore, the explicit expression of the desired estimator gains is obtained by means of the feasibility of certain matrix inequalities. Two additional optimization problems are considered with respect to the H∞ performance index and the weighted error variances. Finally, a simulation example is utilized to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed state estimation method