NETWORKED CONTROL SYSTEMS: AN EMULATION APPROACH TO CONTROLLER DESIGN

We overview our recent work on a design approach for networked control systems (NCS) that resembles controller emulation for sampled-data systems. In the first step, we design a controller ignoring the network and, in the second step, we implement the designed controller over the network with sufficiently fast transmissions and a given protocol. Our results have several features: (i) they apply to general nonlinear systems with disturbances; (ii) we obtain explicit (often non-conservative) bounds on the maximal allowable transmission interval that guarantee stability; (iii) and we show that this approach is valid for a wide range of network scheduling protocols. This provides a flexible framework for design of NCS that is amenable to various extensions and modifications, such as a treatment of dropouts and stochastic protocols, combined controller/protocol design for linear plants, and so on.