Integrated control-communication framework for cyber-physical systems and WSN based control application

The long-term goal of this research is to develop methods based on an integrated control-communication design to support cyber-physical systems and sensor-actuator network based control applications. We formulate network-level abstractions that characterize the information requirements of controllers and applications that use the network, and then design middleware services that implement these abstractions. By doing so, we expect to improve the scalability and reliability of the network layer and at the same time enable an information-adaptive design of the higher level applications: the applications can adjust their performance based on the quality of information available and guarantee robustness despite information loss.

One specific network abstraction that we are exploring is that of distance-sensitivity. The rationale behind exploiting distance sensitivity for information delivery is that for many spatially distributed control systems, the influence of an actuator on sensors decays with distance and likewise a controller tends to be less impacted by sensors that are farther away. By exploiting distance sensitivity properties, 1. the required information to make a decision at each controller can be bounded in terms of the spatial locality around the controller and / or 2. the accuracy and rate at which the information is provided to a controller to a sensor can decrease progressively with distance. As a result, the implementation of network services to meet control requirements becomes simple and efficient.

We are applying our network abstraction based co-design approach in the context of following sensor actuator network based control applications:

1. Vehicular safety and intelligent navigation applications

2. Distributed cooperative control of mobile objects (autonomous vehicles, robots, pursuer-evader systems) for objectives such as optimal pursuit, shape formation and optimal coverage

3. Distributed coverage optimization in large-scale wireless camera networks

Publications in this area:

1. V. Kulathumani, A. Arora and S. Ramagiri, “Pursuit Control over Wireless Sensor Networks using Distance Sensitivity Properties”, Accepted for Publication in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Special Issue on Wireless Sensor Actuator Networks, 56(10), pp.2473—2478, 2011 Extended version

2. B. Lemon, V. Kulathumani, “Local reconfiguration algorithms for simultaneous coverage and tracking using a large scale wireless camera network”, IEEE HST 2011

3. V. Kulathumani, M. Demirbas, A. Arora, M. Sridharan, Trail: A Distance Sensitive Network Protocol for Distributed Object Tracking , EWSN 2007, ACM TOSN

4. Hui Cao, Emre Ertin, Vinodkrishnan Kulathumani et al., Differential Games in Large Scale Sensor Actuator Networks , IPSN'06.

5. V. Kulathumani and A. Arora, Distance Sensitive Snapshots in Wireless Sensor Networks, International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS), 2007

6. V. Kulathumani, A. Arora, Aspects of Distance Sensitive Design of Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE Workshop on Spatial Computing, Venice, Italy, 2008

7. V. Kulathumani, Network Abstractions for Designing Reliable Applications using Wireless Sensor Networks , Ph.D. Thesis, The Ohio State University, June 2008.

8. V. Kulathumani, P. Shankar, Y. Kim, A. Arora, and R. Yedavalli, Reliable Control System Design Despite Byzantine Actuators, Fifth ASME International Conference on Multibody Systems, Nonlinear Dynamics and Controls (MSNDC 2005)

9. Y. Kim, A. Arora, V. Kulathumani, U. Arumugam, and S. Kulkarni, On the Effect of Faults in Vibration Control of Fairing Structures, Fifth ASME International Conference on Multibody Systems, Nonlinear Dynamics and Controls (MSNDC 2005)