When wireless networks meet control applications, they come with many practical advantages, like enhanced flexibility and improved cooperation capabilities in multi-agent systems. Unfortunately, their intrinsic unreliability can lead to dangerous evolutions or failures of the control system, e.g., during blackouts. In other words, even when guarantees on the average system evolution are preserved, safety guarantees are ruined. In this seminar, we tackle safety concerns from a two-fold perspective. First, we address safety in the network design. We introduce some methods to accommodate wireless networks to control applications and we focus on an adaptive data-rate selection algorithm based on the control performances. Second, we address safety in the control design. The key idea is to consider two control loops: the inner control loop, to be implemented at the plant side, makes use of a simple stabilizing controller, while the outer loop, closed over wireless, comprises a sophisticated predictive constrained controller. We introduce some solutions based on MPC and RG, together with their theoretical properties. During the seminar, we present several experimental tests on Wi-Fi to better understand the challenges of the problem and to show the performances of the analyzed strategies.
Join at http://imt.lu/seminar