Controller Design for Systems with Clock Offsets

Abstract:

It's common in controller design to assume that the controller reads the sensors and writes to the actuators at the same time instant. This assumption is often violated in practice because the controller executes its code sequentially on a microprocessor. If the microprocessor is "fast enough," often the controller will still work. However, if the sensing and control are done by two different devices that must communicate across a network, the resulting timing uncertainty due to network delays and clock offsets will often destabilize the controller. In this poster, we describe a method based on polytopic over-approximation for designing a controller that is robust with respect to clock offsets between the sensing and controlling devices.