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performance of the control system, integrating the mechanical system performance metrics with the computing system
performance metrics, and thereafter, to employ quality of
service (QoS) approaches from computer science to improve
the overall performance. In this paper, we assume that traditional techniques are used to design a controller for the
coupled mechanical system, ignoring any implementation
eects. We then show how the best implementation for a
given control system can be determined. Future work will
address mechanisms for designing or re-designing a control
system to take into account the limitations of the underlying computing infrastructure.
2 Background
Traditionally, control algorithms have been designed without consideration of their implementation details. However, when networks are used to carry feedback signals for
a control system, the limited bandwidth induces unavoidable communication delays. In order to successfully analyze
the behavior of a networked control system, the type and
location of these delays must be characterized, and their effect on the performance of the control system understood.
Although some parts of this problem have been studied previously, in this paper we study how the control architecture
| the allocation of control tasks to processing nodes on a
network | aects the mechanical performance.
When a network is used to transmit data, the delay between the initiation time of the message and the delivery
time is in
uenced not only by the speed of the network (bitrate) and message size but also by the amount of other trafc on the network and the communication protocol used.
The communication protocol also aects the reliability and
fault-tolerance of the networked system through its priority
assignment and error-correction schemes. In [5], communication protocol requirements for real-time systems were discussed in detail. A study of the delay characteristics of popular control networks can be found in [6]. It is well-known
that excessive delays in a feedback loop can destabilize a
control system [2]. Thus, in a distributed control system,
the eect of the network induced delays on the stability
of the system should be analyzed. Robust control [3, 9],
state prediction control scheme [1], and recursive information
ow system [8] have been proposed to compensate for
The mechanical performance of a distributed control system depends on the control algorithms used and on the
hardware implementation of those algorithms. The eects
of synchronization [10], sampling frequency [4], and delay
[12] on the performance have been considered by other researchers. However, most of the existing work has focused
on the single-input, single-output case, with one actuator,
one sensor, and one processor. Even when multi-input,
multi-output plants are considered, the control is typically
centralized with the sensor and actuator data perhaps sent
over a network, but there is no distributed coordination
of physically separated mechanical systems. After control
engineers develop block diagrams that describe the system
behavior, the system integrator must answer fundamental
implementation questions. The choice of sampling rates,
processors, and communication protocol, will introduce different communication and computation delays in a system
which will in
uence the overall performance of the system
signicantly. Not only the magnitude but also the location
of the delay aects the system's performance. In the absence of delay, the performance of any system architecture
should be identical. However, since delay is unavoidable in
a distributed system, the architecture which most eciently
arranges the delays should be chosen.
Existing studies on distributed control systems typically assume a predetermined distributed architecture. The analysis of a distributed control systems has to overcome the
complexity inherent in a sampled system, and there is a
lack of nonlinear systems control theory to analyze or synthesize such sampled control laws with respect to output
performance indexes. For these reasons, no rigorous systematic approach to increase the performance of the system by
proper implementation has been developed, although guidelines and simulation studies are presented in [7, 12]. These
preliminary investigations are useful to show the feasibility
of distributed real-time control systems, but they are inadequate in terms of general principles that can be used to
guide the design of distributed control systems.
In this paper, we propose an analytical approach to characterize the eects of the control architecture on the mechanical performance, given a predened control algorithm. This
will allow the system integrator to quickly evaluate many
dierent scenarios and choose the best possible one. It will
also enable future work whereby the control architecture
will be designed together with the control algorithm.
3 Mathematical framework
In this section, we dene the performance criteria for mechanical systems, and then the performance degradation
function associated with dierent time delays. In Section 4,
we present preliminary analytic, simulation, and experimental results which validate this framework.
Within the context of this paper, the performance of a mechanical control system will be dened by how closely the
system tracks a given reference trajectory. That is, given a
desired reference trajectory r(t) for the system, the performance is the dierence between the actual system output
y(t) and the reference, P = ky , rk. Depending on the physical system and the application domain, one of many dierent norms may be used, including the maximum deviation
from the trajectory, the average error along the trajectory,
or the endpoint error.
The focus of this work is on developing methodologies for
implementing control laws using distributed computing systems, not on developing new control laws. Thus, the baseline performance will always be taken to be the expected
value of the performance criteria with no time delay. This
characterization allows us to isolate the eect of the time
delay from the control design.
0.02
0
0.01
Tc = 0.005 sec
Tc = 0.001 sec
Tc = 0.009 sec
0.01
Ty = 0.001 sec
Ty = 0.005 sec
Ty = 0.009 sec
0.01
0.02
0
a. r
time; [sec]
time; [sec]
b. c
c. y
(2)
i;j i;j
The performance dierential functions can be computed analytically for linear systems and numerically for nonlinear
systems. The performance degradation function associated
with a control architecture can be found by summing the
products of the expected time delays with the performance
dierential functions as in equation (2), and this value can
be used to compare with other control architectures.
4 Framework Validation
In the context of a very simple mechanical system, we have
performed basic analysis, simulation studies and experiments to verify the mathematical framework presented in
Section 3.
For the study, we considered a single degree-of-freedom system, consisting of a motor which moves a mass along an
axis. Delays may occur in sending the reference and sensor
data over a network, or in computing the control algorithm.
Time delays in sending the actuator command over a network occur in the same place in the loop as the computational delay, and are not considered separately here. The
block diagram of the system, with the potential time delays
in the loop, is shown in Figure 1. To compute the performance degradation functions for each of the three time
delays, the modied Z -transform was used to compute the
eects of delays [2]. Using this method, we can account for
time delays which are not multiples of the sampling period.
Figure 2 shows the performance degradation functions as
functions of time for the three individual time delays; three
dierent magnitude of time delay are shown for each delay location. As predicted by the Taylor expansion in Section 3.2, these functions r ; c and y are linear functions
of the magnitude of the time delay.
0.02
0.01
0.02
0.01
0.01
time; [sec]
a. c & y
0.01
0.01
0.02
0.02
0
0.01
i;j
i=1 j =1
0.01
time; [sec]
Tr = 0.001 sec
Tr = 0.005 sec
Tr = 0.009 sec
0.02
control modules.
0.01
0.02
0.01
sensing
delay
XX
=
0.02
K
s(s+a)
PLANT
computation
delay
Ts b(z+1)
2(z-1)
B 1+
PI TRACKING
CONTROLLER
reference
delay
REFERENCE
TRAJECTORY
GENERATION
0.02
0
time; [sec]
b. c & r
time; [sec]
c. y & r
combinations of delays.
The eect of control architectures and communication delays on the performance of the two-axis contouring system
was evaluated through simulation studies and experiments
on a small x-y table. This system contains two copies of the
previous single-axis system and a cross-coupled controller.
Although both axes are linear, the cross-coupled controller
has a non-linear term for estimation of contour error and the
performance criteria; the contour error [11] is a nonlinear
function of the axis-level errors and the reference trajectory.
Hence, we use simulations and experiments to validate the
hypotheses.
Although the control algorithms used were very simple and
would, in practice, almost always be implemented on a single processor, a distributed implementation was considered
in order to study the eects of delays on the control performance. We only consider one distributed implementation
containing two delays: x;y and y;x , namely the x-position
data to y-axis system and vice versa.
Figure 4 shows that the performance degradation function
is the sum of x;y and y;x although the 2-axis contouring
system is non-linear. Figure 6(a) also shows that the performance degradation function is a linear function of time
delay.
A small two-axis table with DC motors was used for the experiment. A picture of the experimental set-up is shown in
x 10 - 4
1ms
3ms
5ms
7ms
y,x
x,y
1 x 10
1ms
3ms
5ms
7ms
(x,y + y,x )
x 10 - 4
4
-6
enc. X
5,1
-1
4
0
time: (sec)
a.
10
15
time: (sec)
b.
x;y
10
15
5 time: (sec) 10
c. , (
y;x
3,5
1ms
3ms
5ms
7ms
x;y
15
+ y;x)
data
bank
6,5
3,1
1,7
servo
X
x axis
table
7
C/C
controller
5,2
2,8
servo
Y
4,5
8
y axis
table
4,2
enc. Y
showing the eight basic modules and nine potential communication delays.
5 Design Example
In this section, we show how the performance degradation
function framework can be used to evaluate and compare
several dierent architectures for a distributed control system. A two-axis contouring system is considered again since
it is relatively low-dimensional yet has tight coupling between the axes. It is also nonlinear, showing the broad
applicability of the techniques.
llll vs. delay in communication delay
0.35
ll ave ll
ll abs ll
ll rms ll
ll max ll
16
0.3
0.25
ll ave ll
ll abs ll
ll rms ll
ll max ll
12
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0
0
(a) Simulation
(b) Experiment
After the basic modules and time delay locations have been
identied, the performance dierential functions associated
with each time delay can be found either analytically or by
simulation as discussed in Section 3. Computation of i;i
is not necessary since computation delay aects the system
in the same way as communication delay. Thus, i;i can be
computed using the following equation.
i;i =
X
6
j =i
i;j
(3)
a.
b.
SERVO
X
SERVO
Y
ENC
X
ENC
Y
C/C
CONT.
REF.
INPUT
ENC
X
ENC
Y
C/C
CONT.
REF.
INPUT
MOTOR
X
MOTOR
Y
1
SERVO MOTOR
X
X
a. Completely
distributed
1
SERVO MOTOR
Y
Y
ENC
X
ENC
Y
C/C
CONT.
REF.
INPUT
C/C
CONT.
REF.
INPUT
d. Independent axes
SERVO MOTOR
Y
Y
ENC
X
ENC
Y
REF.
INPUT
SERVO MOTOR
X
X
b. Lumped
servo/motor
SERVO MOTOR
X
X
SERVO MOTOR
Y
Y
C/C
CONT.
c. Lumped
axis control
2
SERVO SERVO
X
Y
C/C
CONT.
REF.
INPUT
ENC
X
ENC
Y
MOTOR MOTOR
X
Y
e. Centralized
With n basic modules, there are i=1 i!(nn,! i)! possible architectures. For each potential architecture, the corresponding time delay matrix needs to be found. The
performance degradation function for all cases can then be
easily compared and the best architecture chosen. In this
design example, we tested the ve architectures shown in
Figure 9. The two extreme cases | completely distributed
and centralized | were chosen as candidates, along with
three other natural groupings in which the servo controller
is together with the motor.
The delay matrix contains the magnitudes of the communication and computation delays. These delays depend
on a number of factors related to the system implementation. Communication delay mainly depends on the type of
network, protocol used, data size, and number of nodes in
the system. Computation delay depends on the processor
power, operating system, and number of computing tasks
assigned to each node. Finding accurate characterizations
for computation and communication delay is another challenging problem and will not be addressed seriously in this
paper (see [6] for some work in this area). For the computation delays, we assumed that each basic module has a
task to be computed which takes ttk = 0:8msec, the time
required to switch between tasks is tsw = 0:3msec, a motor
module requires no computation time, and the computation delay is the time required for all other computation
tasks on the node to be completed. For the communication delay, we assumed that the message transmission
time is ttx = 0:5msec regardless of the size of the message,
and that the communication delay is the time required for
all other nodes on the network to transmit their messages.
Let N be the number of nodes on the network, and nk be
the number of basic modules assigned to node k. Using
these assumptions, the communication delays are equal to
i;j = ttx (N , 1), and the computation delay of a basic
module i on node k is i;i = ttk nk + (nk , 1)tsw . Using
these values, the time delay matrix can be computed for
the ve dierent control architectures shown in Figure 9.
Even though a simplied model was used to estimate ,
well dened communication and computation delay characteristics, if available, can be employed to more accurately
determine the time delay matrix . In this case, each different priority assignment for the same architecture would
result in a dierent time delay matrix .
After computing and , can be computed using equation (2). One advantage of using the proposed performance
degradation function framework is that does not need to
be recomputed or modied for dierent architectures. In
fact, only must be recomputed for each dierent architecture which is considered.
The performance degradation function for each architecture
is computed and shown in Figure 10, along with the individual components i;j . Note that (solid line) in Figure 10 is
of a similar magnitude for each architecture tested. This is
due to the fact that the two-axis system is symmetric, and
the communication delays are all equal, causing the terms
i;j to largely cancel with each other. This phenomenon
was noted in Section 4.1. If the delays are not equal, this
cancellation will not occur. Thus, when choosing an architecture, both the overall performance degradation function
as well as its components i;j should be as small as possible. Thus, for the given assumptions on the magnitudes of
the time delays, the lumped servo/motor architecture (b)
would be the best implementation of the system.
If the reference trajectory is well-characterized (such as a
step, ramp, or the circular contour considered here), then
the Fourier transforms of the performance dierential func-
x 10 -3
x 10 -3
0.8
0.8
0.4
0.4
0.4
-0.4
-0.4
-0.4
-0.8
-0.8
10
time: (sec)
15
a. Completely
distributed
-0.8
10
time: (sec)
15
b. Lumped
servo/motor
x 10 -3
10
time: (sec)
c. Lumped
axis control
x 10 -3
0.8
0.8
0.4
0.4
-0.4
-0.4
-0.8
References
x 10 -3
0.8
-0.8
10
time: (sec)
15
d. Independent axes
10
time: (sec)
15
e. Centralized
each architecture shown in Figure 9 is plotted. The dotted line indicates i;j and the
thick solid line indicates .
15
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