Error Resilient Real-Time State Variable Systems for Signal Processing and Control

The advent of sensor networks, robots, autonomous vehicles and the smart grid have made the dependability of circuits and systems that control them critical to society and national defense. While significant advances in the design of linear and nonlinear control systems have been made to allow modes of operation not possible in the past, the problem of resilience to errors induced by hostile operating environments remains largely unexplored even though the probability of such errors occurring during real-time operation has increased. In this talk we propose mechanisms for detecting transient errors in control systems and circuitry as well as diagnosing and correcting for their effects on overall system operation. It is shown how real-number checksum encodings of circuit function can be used to detect and correct errors in the plant and feedback subsystems of linear control systems. Applications to signal processing and control algorithms are described. It is shown how errors in motor control electronics can be detected and corrected using the proposed methodology. Finally, extensions to nonlinear control systems are presented.