Control of Real Time Large-scale Systems: Airjet Object Movement System
Warren B. Jackson, Markus P. J. Fromherz, David K. Biegelsen, James Reich, and David Goldberg
Abstract
The control of real time large-scale systems - systems with large
aggregations of sensors and actuators - is seldom explored in actual
operating physical systems. In such many-element systems, control
issues such as actuation allocation, fusion of sensor data, and system
identification emerge as interesting research areas for control
research. In this work, the ideas are applied to the control of an
object moving system with 1,152 actuators and 32,000 sensors with a 2
ms control loop time. Solutions for allocating actuation among large
numbers of actuators using hierarchical constrained optimization and
fusing the output of many sensors into a small number of final
measurements under tight real time constraints have been
developed. Also, such hyper-redundant systems are capable of system
self-identification - the aggregate of properties of many elements can
be used to measure detailed properties of individual elements. This
work highlights the need for new theoretical work in the control of
many-element systems.
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