Wireless Control Setup
Interacting first hand with Wireless Control Systems
In our lab, we have constructed a wireless control system that stabilizes an experimental inverted pendulum setup. The controller will be computing control commands based on the received measurements from a wireless sensor network (WSN) consisting of two sensor nodes. By logging the network data during the closed-loop experiments, we can see that this fairly simple networked control system (NCS) exhibits very rich behavior in terms of the network-induced effects.
The application of WSNs to motion control is of particular interest to companies whose machines experience signi cant disturbances (due to vibrations of the cables used for communication) and frequent repair (due to cables breaking). Hence, removing cables in certainly bene cial in such motion control applications. However, wireless communication also introduces negative effects which can be experimentally observed with this setup.
Fortunately, it is currently becoming increasingly easier to building an experimental networked control setup. The TelosB and the WaspMote are examples of versatile wireless devices that have open-source operating systems systems which have been developed by computer science communities to enable developers to easily interact with these devices and to contribute to the constantly growing software library. By using these open-source devices which are commercially available, the code developed as a result of the work done to build this setup can be directly implemented on compatible devices, thereby enabling other research groups to quickly build similar experimental setups to verify their own theory or use our developed software for analysis.