Framework for Adaptive Controller Design Over Wireless Delay-Prone Communication Channels

Control over wireless channels promises to be a great enabler for an interconnected world. Historically, the “control engineering” and “wireless communications” domains were seen as separate, but with upcoming 5G networks, joint design of wireless control systems promises large gains in both the domains for a wide range of applications. By means of a typical industrial use case of the automated guided vehicles (AGVs), we present a methodology to analyze the latency requirements along with the wireless links from a controller to a plant (downlink) and from a plant to its controller (uplink). From the perspective of a Wireless Communications Engineer, we present a framework to analyze the basic properties of the resulting control cycle in order to derive feasible latency values that differ from the commonly found values in the communications literature. Also, we highlight an approach to derive the proportional-derivative (PD) controller parameters that yield the best control performance according to the integral of absolute error (IAE) criterion. At last, we present the idea of a cross-domain manager (CDM) that is able to translate (in real-time) the current network performance metrics to optimal controller gains.