Citation
Rahul Mangharam. "Distributed Control-as-a-Service with Wireless Swarm Systems". Talk or presentation, 29, September, 2013; Presented at the First International Workshop on the Swarm at the Edge of the Cloud (SEC'13 @ ESWeek), Montreal.

Abstract
We present early ideas on truly distributed control with Wireless Swarm Systems. As opposed to traditional networked control schemes where the nodes simply route information to and from a dedicated controller (perhaps performing some encoding along the way), our approach treats the network itself as the controller. In other words, the computation of the control law is done in a fully distributed way inside the network. In this approach, at each time-step, each node updates its internal state to be a linear combination of the states of the nodes in its neighborhood. This causes the entire network to behave as a linear dynamical system, with sparsity constraints imposed by the network topology. This eliminates the need for routing between "sensor -> channel -> dedicated controller/estimator -> channel -> actuator'', allows for simple transmission scheduling, is operational on resource constrained low-power nodes and allows for composition of additional control loops and plants. In our recent efforts, we have demonstrated the potential of such controller swarm systems to be robust to a high degree of link failures and to maintain stability even in cases of node failures. We also address the problem of wireless control network synthesis with guaranteed optimal performance of the plant, with respect to standard cost functions. As the needs of the plant are revised and the network topology changes, we envision a cloud service to synthesize these control network configurations for robust, optimal and flexible control with future swarm systems.

Electronic downloads

• DistributedControlAsAServiceForWirelessSwarmSystems_Mangharam_SEC13_Montreal.pdf · application/pdf · 6208 kbytes
• http://www.src.org/library/publication/p067998/. (SRC Website)

• HTML

  Rahul Mangharam. <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/118.html"><i>Distributed
  Control-as-a-Service with Wireless Swarm
  Systems</i></a>, Talk or presentation,  29,
  September, 2013; Presented at the <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/conferences/13/swarm/index.htm"
  >First International Workshop on the Swarm at the Edge of
  the Cloud (SEC'13 @ ESWeek)</a>, Montreal.

• Plain text

  Rahul Mangharam. "Distributed Control-as-a-Service with
  Wireless Swarm Systems". Talk or presentation,  29,
  September, 2013; Presented at the <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/conferences/13/swarm/index.htm"
  >First International Workshop on the Swarm at the Edge of
  the Cloud (SEC'13 @ ESWeek)</a>, Montreal.

• BibTeX

  @presentation{Mangharam13_DistributedControlasaServiceWithWirelessSwarmSystems,
      author = {Rahul Mangharam},
      title = {Distributed Control-as-a-Service with Wireless
                Swarm Systems},
      day = {29},
      month = {September},
      year = {2013},
      note = {Presented at the <a
                href="http://www.terraswarm.org/conferences/13/swarm/index.htm"
                >First International Workshop on the Swarm at the
                Edge of the Cloud (SEC'13 @ ESWeek)</a>, Montreal.},
      abstract = {We present early ideas on truly distributed
                control with Wireless Swarm Systems. As opposed to
                traditional networked control schemes where the
                nodes simply route information to and from a
                dedicated controller (perhaps performing some
                encoding along the way), our approach treats the
                network itself as the controller. In other words,
                the computation of the control law is done in a
                fully distributed way inside the network. In this
                approach, at each time-step, each node updates its
                internal state to be a linear combination of the
                states of the nodes in its neighborhood. This
                causes the entire network to behave as a linear
                dynamical system, with sparsity constraints
                imposed by the network topology. This eliminates
                the need for routing between "sensor -> channel ->
                dedicated controller/estimator -> channel ->
                actuator'', allows for simple transmission
                scheduling, is operational on resource constrained
                low-power nodes and allows for composition of
                additional control loops and plants. In our recent
                efforts, we have demonstrated the potential of
                such controller swarm systems to be robust to a
                high degree of link failures and to maintain
                stability even in cases of node failures. We also
                address the problem of wireless control network
                synthesis with guaranteed optimal performance of
                the plant, with respect to standard cost
                functions. As the needs of the plant are revised
                and the network topology changes, we envision a
                cloud service to synthesize these control network
                configurations for robust, optimal and flexible
                control with future swarm systems.},
      URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/118.html}
  }
  

Posted by Christopher Brooks on 29 Sep 2013.