Robust Team-Triggered Coordination for Real-Time Control of Networked Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract:

The main goal of this project is to lay down the foundations of a novel approach based on opportunistic statetriggered aperiodic control for networked cyberphysical systems that leverages their cooperative nature. Most networked controllers are not implementable over embedded digital computer systems because they rely on continuous time or synchronous executions that are costly to enforce. These assumptions are unrealistic when faced with the cyber-physical world, where the interaction between computational and physical components is multiplex, information acquisition is subject to error and delay, and agent schedules are asynchronous. Even without implementation obstacles, the periodic availability of information leads to a wasteful use of resources. Tuning sensing, communication, and control execution to the task at hand offers the potential for great savings. This project seeks to bring this opportunity to fruition by combining state triggered control ideas into a unified approach that inherits the best of event and self triggered models. Specific research objectives include the development of (i) methods to generate, reason about, and dynamically adapt setvalued information models that can cope with uncertainty about the state of the network and the environment, (ii) techniques to synthesize and analyze distributed strategies that account for the resource constraints of the network and can be implemented with the partial setvalued information models available to individual agents, and (iii) certification guarantees on the resulting cooperative strategies and the precise characterization of their robustness, efficiency, and privacy. We report progress made during this period on the development of the teamtriggered approach to the realtime implementation of distributed controllers and the opportunistic event-triggered stabilization of linear systems under channel blackouts.