February 12, 2016, Webb 1100

In networked control systems, two fundamentally important questions are when and what to transmit over a constrained communication resource. Event-triggered control provides a paradigm to answer the first question for various kinds of systems and control goals. Information-theoretic ideas have been quite successful in answering the latter question. In this talk, I will present a control scheme that combines the two approaches to deal with the control of continuous-time linear time-invariant systems under bounded channel rates. The control scheme stabilizes the system state to zero at a desired convergence rate and with a quantifiable average data rate. Then, I will show how this framework can be used to control under time-varying channels, possibly including blackouts, i.e., intervals of time during which the channel is completely unavailable for control, such as when there is scheduling.

Pavan Tallapragada received the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2013. He is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests are in the broad area of networked and distributed cyber physical systems and specifically on topics such as event-triggered control, privacy in CPS and networked transportation systems.