Coordination in Networked Mechanical Systems

Abstract

The goal of this summer research was to find a way to control mechanical systems over unreliable communication networks. These systems become unstable due to time delay in the communication port. Using wave scattering theory, we solved the problem of time delay in a bilateral teleoperation and controlled network systems. For both bilateral teleoperation and controlled network systems, we created theoretical simulations in MATLAB for three cases: in absence of time delay, in presence of time delay, and in the case of time delay compensation. In the lab, we tested the theoretical simulation design of controlled network system on a simple servo system for all three cases. We controlled the servo system by implementing the wave scattering transformation to solve the problem of time delay. We recorded the steady state error for various time delays and concluded that as time delay increased, the steady state error in system’s response increased as well.