Resilient Wireless Sensor Actuator Networks

Abstract: 

Wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSAN) are systems consisting of numerous sensing and actuation devices that interact with the environment and coordinate their activities over a wireless communication network. WSANs represent an important class of cyber-physical system (CPS) found in our national civil infrastructure. This project addresses the issue of resilience in WSANs. A resilient system is one that maintains an active awareness of surrounding threats and reacts to those threats in a manner that returns the system to operational normalcy in finite time. It has proven challenging to ensure resilience in large-scale WSANs because of the complexity such scale brings. The project’s approach rests on two fundamental trends. One trend concerns the revolution in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication networks that promise wireless networking with greater peak bit-rates and reliability than previously possible. The other trend comes from recent ideas that use quantization and event-triggered feedback in a unified manner to reduce bit rates required by real-time control systems. In this poster, we will report our progresses on the resilient networked control design through dynamic quantization and event-triggered feedback. In addition, we will report the progresses on the resilient cooperative control for a group of robots using hybrid control theory, and the development of a multi-robotic testbed consisting of unmanned ground vehicles and the use of testbed to evaluate and demonstrate this integrated control/communication approach to resilience.