1 kHz remote control of a balancing robot with Wi-Fi-in-the-loop

Countless industrial applications can potentially benefit from the implementation of wireless control systems, leading to a widespread research effort to investigate new solutions in the field. Nevertheless, currently available wireless communication standards for industrial automation are not able to achieve high control frequencies. In particular, time-critical applications (e.g. industrial robotics and manipulation) require high sampling frequencies to be properly implemented. The higher throughput provided by IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) can theoretically tame critical applications, although reliability is a key issue. In this work Wi-Fi is adopted to increase the achievable control rates up to 1 kHz, while reliability is guaranteed by mitigating communication flaws through model-based estimation techniques. The core of the proposed approach relies on a modified Kalman filter that exploits a buffer of incoming measures to account for delayed data packets. The proposed solution is validated through a hardware-in-the-loop experiment that features actual Wi-Fi hardware and a commercial embedded PC board. The obtained results give a preliminary, yet valuable, validation of the proposed approach testing the solution on relevant hardware.