Stabilizing and tracking control of multiple pendulum-cart systems over a shared wireless network

Interest in networked control systems has grown rapidly. In some remotely time critical control applications, multiple sensors and actuators are connected to controllers via a shared wireless network. Feedback and control information is transmitted over the network, and the time critical data traffic can tolerate only low bit error probability and bounded delays. This paper investigates control and communication of multiple dynamical systems in time critical networked control applications by accomplishing stabilizing and tracking control of multiple pendulum-cart systems over a shared wireless network. A testbed was developed consisting of three pendulum-carts remotely controlled by one embedded controller. The scheduling of the multiple plants accessing to the shared channel uses a time division multiplexing (TDM) scheme. PD control laws are deployed, meanwhile, Kalman filtering is considered to compensate for data packet loss in network transmission. Experimental results validate that the multiple pendulums can be stabilized while the carts accurately track the desired trajectories.