Sparse Packetized Predictive Control for Networked Control over Erasure Channels

TL;DR

This paper introduces a sparse packetized predictive control method for networked control systems over erasure channels, enhancing robustness to packet-dropouts by using sparsity-promoting optimizations and providing stability guarantees.

Contribution

It proposes a novel sparse optimization-based control scheme for erasure channels, with practical stability conditions and efficient algorithms for packet size reduction.

Findings

Guarantees practical stability under bounded packet-dropouts

Uses sparsity-promoting optimization for data reduction

Provides sufficient conditions for control system stability

Abstract

We study feedback control over erasure channels with packet-dropouts. To achieve robustness with respect to packet-dropouts, the controller transmits data packets containing plant input predictions, which minimize a finite horizon cost function. To reduce the data size of packets, we propose to adopt sparsity-promoting optimizations, namely, ell-1-ell-2 and ell-2-constrained ell-0 optimizations, for which efficient algorithms exist. We derive sufficient conditions on design parameters, which guarantee (practical) stability of the resulting feedback control systems when the number of consecutive packet-dropouts is bounded.