Control with Time-varying Processor Availability

As Cyberphysical systems evolve, the implicit assumption traditionally made in control theory about the presence of a dedicated processor that is able to execute any desired control algorithm at every time step may break down. To maintain performance in the presence of limited and time-varying processor availability, we look at the design of an anytime control algorithm. The basic idea is to begin with a coarse control input and refine it as more processing time becomes available. Analytic results and numerical simulations illustrate that the proposed algorithm may yield significant performance improvement.
Vijay Gupta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He received his B. Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology, all in Electrical Engineering. Prior to joining Notre Dame, he also served as a research associate in the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests include networked control systems and sensor networks, distributed estimation and detection, and, in general, the interaction of communication, computation and control.