SENTIENT Project
Scheduling of EveNt-TrIggerEd coNtrol Tasks
Project funded under the ERC-Starting Grant #755953
The advances in electronic communication and computation have enabled the ubiquity of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS): digital systems that regulate and control all sorts of physical processes, such as chemical reactors, water distribution and power networks. These systems require the timely communication of sensor measurements and control actions to provide their prescribed functionalities. Event-triggered control (ETC) techniques, which communicate only when needed to enforce performance, have attracted attention as a mean to reduce the communication traffic and save energy on (wireless) networked control systems (NCS). However, despite ETC’s great communication reductions, the scheduling of the aperiodic and largely unpredictable traffic that ETC generates remains widely unaddressed – hindering its true potential for energy and bandwidth savings.
To address this problem, in project the SENTIENT we are investigating the following scientific challenges:
- the construction of models for ETC’s communication traffic;
- the design of schedulers based on such models guaranteeing prescribed performance levels.
To reach these goals, we are employing methods at the cross-roads between theoretical computer science, control systems and communications engineering. We follow a two step approach:
- modeling as timed-priced-game-automata (TPGA) the timing of communications of event-triggered control systems;
- solving games over TPGAs to prevent data communication collisions and ensure prescribed performances for the control tasks.
The project’s most practical objective is to produce algorithms facilitating the efficient implementation of control loops over shared communication resources, and increasing the energy efficiency of wireless NCS.The advances will be demonstrated on automotive and wireless water-distribution control applications, showcasing the potential economic impact from the reduction of implementation and maintenance costs on CPSs.
Publications
Journal Articles
1.
A self-guided approach for navigation in a minimalistic foraging robotic swarm Journal Article
In: Autonomous Robots, pp. 1–16, 2023.
2.
Adaptive self-triggered control of a remotely operated P3-DX robot: Simulation and experimentation Journal Article
In: Robotics and Autonomous Systems, vol. 62, no. 6, pp. 847–854, 2014.
Proceedings Articles
3.
Robust Event-Driven Interactions in Cooperative Multi-agent Learning Proceedings Article
In: International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems, pp. 281–297, Springer International Publishing Cham 2022.
4.
Event-Based Communication in Distributed Q-Learning Proceedings Article
In: 2022 IEEE 61st Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pp. 2379–2386, IEEE 2022.
5.
Convergence of Ant Colony Multi-Agent Swarms Proceedings Article
In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, Association for Computing Machinery, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2020, ISBN: 9781450370189.