Predictive control of nonlinear continuous networked control systems with large time-varying transmission delays and transmission protocols

In this paper, we consider a class of globally Lipschitz nonlinear continuous networked control systems (NCS) incorporating large time-varying transmission delays and transmission protocols of communication networks with periodic sampling. To stabilize the NCS, we propose a new predictive control design scheme with plant outputs as the only available data. With uniformly globally exponentially stable (UGES) protocols, input-to-state stability of the entire NCS is ensured by small gain theory. In particular, the predictive controller can compensate transmission delays with any finite upper bound under the constraint that the sampling periods of the plant output and the observer output are small enough as well as the constraint that the predictor is accurate enough. The scheme is applied to a benchmark example to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.