Networked Control of Distributed Systems: A Testbed

A testbed for networked control of dynamical systems, recently developed by the authors at the University of Illinois, is described. It is comprised of planar aerial vehicles (hovercraft) which use the Bluetooth chipset for wireless communication, and inertial and vision sensing. The testbed is directly connected, via a Linux-based ground station, to a large Internet networking laboratory containing numerous routers, and thus the developed facility has the capability to model numerous wireless and Internet scenarios in networked control.