Experimental study of DC motor control via communication network using Markovian jump system approach

Control systems, where the control loops are closed through a communication network, are called Networked Control System (NCS). Research on NCS has received increased attention in recent years due to the advancement of control, computation and communication technologies. NCS makes the design and implementation of control systems with reduced complexity due to simpler installation and easy maintenance. However, the insertion of the communication network in the feedback control loop introduces some communication parameters such as a packet dropout that degrades the control system performance and also causes system instability. This paper describes the experimental study of NCS in the form of DC motor control via communication network using Markovian jump system approach. In this study, the existence of packet dropout as network parameter is treated as state variable of the underlying Markov chain. Inclusion packet dropout modelling into state space representation of the whole system renders Markovian jump system framework. Furthermore, a state feedback controller is designed so that a closed loop of NCS achieves the certain performance. Feedback gains which associated with such controller are calculated by solving linear matrix inequalities (LMI). The experimental results show that setpoint tracking performance provided by the switching controller that depend on the existence of the packet dropout or not. From the experiment, we observe that the greater the probability of transition packet dropout occurs, the worse of control system performance.