Symbolic Control Design of Nonlinear Networked Control Systems

Networked Control Systems (NCS) are distributed systems where plants, sensors, actuators and controllers communicate over shared networks. Non-ideal behaviors of the communication network include variable sampling/transmission intervals and communication delays, packet losses, communication constraints and quantization errors. NCS have been the object of intensive study in the last few years. However, due to the inherent complexity of NCS, current literature focuses on only a subset of these non-idealities and mostly considers stability and stabilizability problems. Recent technology advances indeed demand that different and more complex control objectives are considered. In this paper we present first a general model of NCS, including all the non-idealities of the communication network; then, we propose a symbolic model approach to the control design with objectives expressed in terms of non-deterministic transition systems. The presented results are based on recent advances in symbolic control design of hybrid and continuous control systems. An example in the context of robot motion planning with remote control is included, showing the effectiveness of the approach taken.