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GRASP Seminar Series: Fall 2007
October 5 , 11:00 a.m., Wu & Chen Auditorium, Levine Hall (3330 Walnut Street)
Bruno
Sinopoli
Carnegie Mellon University
"Estimation and Control over Networks of Embedded Devices"
Abstract: Recent
technological advancements have given rise to a new class of computing
and communication systems, composed of wired/wireless networked embedded
subsystems. Use of these networked embedded devices for the coordination
and control of large systems in the physical world, such as infrastructures,
can improve performance of existing applications as well as pave the
road to the conception of new ones. Applications like inventory monitoring
and control, home and building automation, power systems, security systems,
precision agriculture, can all benefit from the use of a network connecting
its components, by reducing operating cost and improving performance.
This flexibility comes at the cost of complexity. In particular, when
dealing with control applications, the effect of communication delays
and loss of information in the control loop cannot be neglected, since
data travel along unreliable communication channels in possibly large,
wireless, multi-hop sensor network. In this talk, I will develop the
rudiments of a theory of estimation and control for networked embedded
systems to address these problems.
For the sake of motivation consider the following problem: We wish to
navigate a fleet of vehicles using observations from a sensor web. Wireless sensor
nodes collect vehicle sensor measurements and transmit them to a computing unit.
The computing unit in turn generates state estimates for each vehicle and computes
control commands, which are then delivered, using the same wireless channel,
to the actuators onboard the vehicles. We then ask: What is the amount of data
loss that the control loop can tolerate to reliably perform the navigation task?
Can communication protocols be designed to satisfy this constraint?
We will show that the answer to these questions requires a generalization
of classical control techniques that explicitly take into account the
stochastic nature of the communication channel. Within this framework,
we will show a variety of results on the validity of the separation
principle under different protocol models, as well as analytical characterization
of different transition behaviors that arise in the feedback loop when
the packet loss rate rises above a certain critical level.
Biography: Bruno Sinopoli is assistant professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously he was a postdoctoral scholar both at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D in Electrical Engineering at U.C. Berkeley in 2005. His research interests are in the design and analyis of networked embedded systems, with particular focus on wireless sensor actuator networks, distributed estimation, control over unreliable networks and security. Applications include environmental monitoring, industrial automation, office and building automation, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, and the automotive industry.
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