Control strategy of distributed actuators with compensation for communication delay

In the case of the Ubiquitous Robot, the robot elements such as sensor, controller and actuator are distributed in the environment. This system aims at supporting robots and human beings by enabling their cooperation. In order to get high customizability, modularized robot elements are desired. For this reason, it is preferred that the functionality of each element is small. When one promotes the low functionalization of the modules and implements the service through their cooperation, communication and middleware technology-related problems must be solved in order to facilitate the system design. From the viewpoint of control, the issues of communication delay and time synchronization are important when the distributed actuators cooperate with each other through unstable communication such as wireless communication. However, control has not been sufficiently researched as far as communication delay and time synchronization are concerned. In this paper, a control strategy for the distributed actuators which compensates communication delay is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is validated through simulation results.