This paper studies the tracking control problem of networked multi-agent systems under both multiple networks and event-triggered mechanisms. Multiple networks are to connect multiple agents and reference systems with decentralized controllers to guarantee their information transmission, whereas the event-triggered mechanisms are to reduce the information transmission via the networks. In this paper, each agent has a network to communicate with its controller and reference system, and all networks are independent and asynchronous and have local event-triggered mechanisms, which are based on local measurements and determine whether the local measurements need to be transmitted via the corresponding network. To address this scenario, we first implement the emulation-based approach to develop a novel hybrid model for the tracking control of networked multi-agent systems. Next, sufficient conditions are derived and decentralized event-triggered mechanisms are designed to guarantee the desired tracking performance. Furthermore, the proposed approach is applied to derive novel results for the event-triggered observer design problem of networked multi-agent systems. Finally, two numerical examples are presented to illustrate the validity of the developed results.
This paper studies the tracking control problem of networked and quantized control systems under both multiple networks and event-triggered mechanisms. Multiple networks are to connect the plant and reference system with decentralized controllers to guarantee their information transmission, whereas event-triggered mechanisms are to reduce the information transmission via multiple networks. In this paper, all networks are independent and asynchronous and have local event-triggered mechanisms, which are based on local measurements and determine whether the local measurements need to be transmitt…
Dynamic watermarking schemes can enhance the cyber attack detection capability of networked control systems (NCSs). This paper presents a linear event-triggered solution to conventional dynamic watermarking (CDW) schemes. Firstly, the limitations of CDW schemes for event-triggered state estimation based NCSs are investigated. Secondly, a new event-triggered dynamic watermarking (ETDW) scheme is designed by treating watermarking as symmetric key encryption, based on the limit convergence theorem in probability. Its security property against the generalized replay attacks (GRAs) is also discusse…
This paper investigates the distributed event-triggered control problem for a class of uncertain pure-feedback nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) with polluted feedback. Under the setting of event-triggered control, substantial challenges exist in both control design and stability analysis for systems in more general non-affine pure-feedback forms wherein all state variables are not directly and continuously available or even polluted due to sensor failures, and thus far very limited results are available in literature. In this work, a nominal control strategy under regular state feedback is…
Networked microgrids with high penetration of distributed generators have ubiquitous remote information exchange, which may be exposed to various cyber security threats. This paper, for the first time, addresses a consensus problem in terms of frequency synchronisation in networked microgrids subject to multi-layer denial of service (DoS) attacks, which could simultaneously affect communication, measurement and control actuation channels. A unified notion of Persistency-of-Data-Flow (PoDF) is proposed to characterise the data unavailability in different information network links, and further q…
Most approaches for self-triggered control (STC) of nonlinear networked control systems (NCS) require measurements of the full system state to determine transmission times. However, for most control systems only a lower dimensional output is available. To bridge this gap, we present in this paper an output-feedback STC approach for nonlinear NCS. An asymptotically stable observer is used to reconstruct the plant state and transmission times are determined based on the observer state. The approach employs hybrid Lyapunov functions and a dynamic variable to encode past state information and to m…
Wireless sensors and actuators offer benefits to large industrial control systems. The absence of wires for communication reduces the deployment cost, maintenance effort, and provides greater flexibility for sensor and actuator location and system architecture. These benefits come at a cost of a high probability of communication delay or message loss due to the unreliability of radio-based communication. This unreliability poses a challenge to contemporary control systems that are designed with the assumption of instantaneous and reliable communication. Wireless sensors and actuators create a …
Passivity based distributed tracking control of networked Euler-Lagrange systems
Jan C. Willems Center for Systems and Control, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学科学与工程学部扬C威尔姆斯系统与控制中心）；Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学科学与工程学部）
A Passivity-Based Design for Stability and Robustness in Event-Triggered Networked Control Systems with Communication Delays, Signal Quantizations and Packet Dropouts
This paper studies the tracking control problem of nonlinear networked and quantized control systems (NQCSs) with communication delays. The desired trajectory is generated by a reference system. The communication network is to guarantee the information transmission among the plant, the reference system and the controller. The communication network also brings about some undesired issues like time-varying transmission intervals, time-varying transmission delays, packet dropouts, scheduling and quantization effects, which lead to non-vanishing network-induced errors and affect the tracking perfo…
Event-triggered Control and Online Learning for Networked Systems under Computational Delays
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）；Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence（慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）
We propose a distributed (single) target tracking scheme based on networked estimation and consensus algorithms over static sensor networks. The tracking part is based on linear time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurement proposed in our previous works. This paper, in particular, develops delay-tolerant distributed filtering solutions over sparse data-transmission networks. We assume general arbitrary heterogeneous delays at different links. This may occur in many realistic large-scale applications where the data-sharing between different nodes is subject to latency due to communication-reso…
In bipartite consensus tracking (BCT) tasks for nonlinear multiagent systems, stochastic disturbances and actuator faults are regarded as essential factors that hamper effective controller formulation and tracking precision improvement. To address these difficulties, we design an improved finitetime performance function (FTPF) for a fuzzy fault-tolerant distributed cooperative control scheme to achieve finite-time robust precision BCT tasks for nonlinear multiagent systems. The parameter selection range of the improved FTPF is relaxed, which renders systems to achieve better transient performa…
This paper studies the event-triggered distributed fusion estimation problems for a class of nonlinear networked multisensor fusion systems without noise statistical characteristics. When considering the limited resource problems of two kinds of communication channels (i.e., sensor-to-remote estimator channel and smart sensor-to-fusion center channel), an event-triggered strategy and a dimensionality reduction strategy are introduced in a unified networked framework to lighten the communication burden. Then, two kinds of compensation strategies in terms of a unified model are designed to restr…
This paper investigates the design of self-triggered controllers for networked control systems (NCSs), where the dynamics of the plant is \textit{unknown} apriori. To deal with the unknown transition dynamics, we employ the Gaussian process (GP) regression in order to learn the dynamics of the plant. To design the self-triggered controller, we formulate an optimal control problem, such that the optimal control and communication policies can be jointly designed based on the GP model of the plant. Moreover, we provide an overall implementation algorithm that jointly learns the dynamics of the pl…
Distributed Nonlinear Control of Networked Two-Wheeled Robots under Adversarial Interactions
Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS)（十月中旬理工学院）；Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM)（加查马达大学）；Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB)（万隆理工学院）；University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）
University College Cork（科克大学学院）；Munster Technological University（芒斯特理工大学）
Networked control systems have gained considerable attention over the last decade as a result of the trend towards decentralised control applications and the emergence of cyber-physical system applications. However, real-world wireless networked control systems suffer from limited communication bandwidths, reliability issues, and a lack of awareness of network dynamics due to the complex nature of wireless networks. Combining machine learning and event-triggered control has the potential to alleviate some of these issues. For example, machine learning can be used to overcome the problem of a l…
Event-triggered control (ETC) and time-triggered control (TTC), the classical concepts to determine the transmission instants for networked control systems, each come with drawbacks: It is difficult to tune ETC such that a certain bandwidth is respected, whereas TTC cannot adapt the sampling interval to the current state of the control system. In this article, we provide an overview over rollout ETC, a method aimed at reconciling the advantages of ETC and TTC. We unite two variants of rollout ETC under a common framework and present conditions for convergence and compliance with a predefined b…
Self-triggered control (STC) is a sample-and-hold control method aimed at reducing communications within networked-control systems; however, existing STC mechanisms often maximize how late the next sample is, and as such they do not provide any sampling optimality in the long-term. In this work, we devise a method to construct self-triggered policies that provide near-maximal average inter-sample time (AIST) while respecting given control performance constraints. To achieve this, we rely on finite-state abstractions of a reference event-triggered control, in which early triggers are also allow…
In the context of networked control systems, event-triggered control (ETC) has emerged as a major topic due to its alleged resource usage reduction capabilities. However, this is mainly supported by numerical simulations, and very little is formally known about the traffic generated by ETC. This work devises a method to estimate, and in some cases to determine exactly, the minimum average inter-sample time (MAIST) generated by periodic event-triggered control (PETC) of linear systems. The method involves abstracting the traffic model using a bisimulation refinement algorithm and finding the cy…
This paper investigates a distributed formation tracking control law for large-scale networks of mechanical systems. In particular, the formation network is represented by a directed communication graph with leaders and followers, where each agent is described as a port-Hamiltonian system with a constant mass matrix. Moreover, we adopt a distributed parameter approach to prove the scalable asymptotic stability of the network formation, i.e., the scalability with respect to the network size and the specific formation preservation. A simulation case illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed …
This paper investigates the design of self-triggered control for networked control systems (NCS), where the dynamics of the plant is unknown apriori. To deal with the nature of the self-triggered control, in which state measurements are transmitted to the controller a-periodically, we propose to lift the continuous-time dynamics to a novel dynamical model by taking an inter-event time as an additional input, and then, the lifted model is learned by the Gaussian processes (GP) regression. Moreover, we propose a learning-based approach, in which a self-triggered controller is learned by minimizi…
In this paper, we present a model-based periodic event-triggered control mechanism for nonlinear continuous-time Networked Control Systems. A sampled-data prediction of the system behavior is used at the actuator to reduce the amount of required communication while maintaining a user-defined performance level. This prediction is based on a possibly inaccurate discretization of the nonlinear system dynamics and can be implemented on simple hardware. Nevertheless, guarantees for asymptotic stability and a user-defined performance level are given for the periodic event-triggered control (PETC) me…
Self-triggered control (STC) is a resource efficient approach to determine sampling instants for Networked Control Systems (NCS). Recently, a dynamic STC strategy based on hybrid Lyapunov functions for nonlinear NCS has been proposed in Hertneck and Allgöwer (2021b), however with the limitation to NCS without transmission delays. In this paper, we extend this strategy for nonlinear NCS with transmission delays. The capability to handle systems with delays makes it possible to use the resulting dynamic STC mechanism in many practical scenarios where instant transmissions without delays cannot b…
We study the self-triggered stabilization of discrete-time linear systems with quantized state measurements. In the networked control system we consider, sensors may be spatially distributed and be connected to a self-triggering mechanism through finite data-rate channels. Each sensor independently encodes its measurements and sends them to the self-triggering mechanism. The self-triggering mechanism integrates quantized measurement data and then computes sampling times. Assuming that the closed-loop system is stable in the absence of quantization and self-triggered sampling, we propose a join…
Networked Control Systems typically come with a limited communication bandwidth and thus require special care when designing the underlying control and triggering law. A method that allows to consider hard constraints on the communication traffic as well as on states and inputs is self-triggered model predictive control (MPC). In this scheme, the optimal length of the sampling interval is determined proactively using predictions of the system behavior. However, previous formulations of self-triggered MPC have neglected the widespread phenomenon of packet loss, such that these approaches might …
