Middleware and Abstractions in the Convergence of Control with Communication and Computation

Control technology is entering what may arguably be called its third computational generation, featuring powerful computational facilities, general purpose wire-line or wireless networks, powerful computational services, and large numbers of possibly distributed sensor and actuators: For the development and proliferation of such control systems it appears that it is important to address three challenges. What are the appropriate abstractions and what is the corresponding architecture of such systems? What are the middleware services that are needed for ease of application development and deployment? What are the appropriate theories to exploit the capabilities of these systems? This tutorial is aimed at addressing these three issues. The Etherware middleware is described, an abstraction of virtual collaboration is identified, and it is detailed how Etherware supports the abstraction. The principle of local temporal autonomy is described to address the need for reliability and robustness. These issues are also illustrated on the experimental and development testbed in the Convergence Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Open theoretical problems are identified, along with speculation on what a future theory may entail.