Exploring the role of a smartphone as a motion sensing and control device in the wireless networked control of a motor test-bed

The sensing, computing, and control potential of smartphones remains to be fully explored in automatic control applications. In this paper, we control the angular position of a motor test-bed using feedback from the embedded motion sensors of a smartphone while it is mounted to the test-bed. The smartphone hosts an interactive user interface which students and researchers can use to quickly and easily perform experiments with the test-bed and collect measurements using their own personal devices. Proportional-plus-derivative (PD) controllers designed using a sampled-data model of the system are compared for different sampling rates used on the smartphone. Results from simulations and experiments confirm the feasibility of utilizing mounted smartphones in the wireless networked control of systems with rotational degrees of freedom.