The developments over the past decades have led to the production of cheap yet powerful devices that can communicate with one another, can sense and act on their environment and can be deployed in large numbers to deliver an abundance of data. Such devices and the networks they form (broadly grouped under the term wireless sensor networks) bring together communication, computation, sensing and control and have enabled monitoring and automation at an unprecedented scale.

Especially challenging in this context are networked control systems, where feedback control loops are closed over networked, distributed communication platforms. To take full advantage of this technology novel design methods are necessary that transcend the traditional borders between disciplines, to apply the principles of feedback to complex, interconnected systems.

The objective of this Project is to generate precisely such a co-design framework, to integrate architectural constraints and performance trade-offs from control, communication, computation, complexity and energy management. This will allow the development of more efficient, robust and affordable networked control technologies that scale and adapt with changing application demands.

By focusing on wirelessly connected networks and leveraging on recent advances in sensor networks, we will study networked control from a fundamental point of view. We will extend the current scientific state-of-the-art in networked control and will develop a software tool set to support our co-design framework.

To demonstrate and evaluate this framework, we will apply it to two industrial case studies: a flying quadrotor laboratory equipment controlled through a communication network, and a wireless sensor network for soil moisture monitoring and control in farms. The case studies are chosen to test the applicability and limitations of the developed approach over a variety of network induced constraints.