Sugar Momma

Like every good grad student I'm always looking for ways to get more money. One way of approaching that is to look at the current buzzwords that are flying out of research journals, and finding ways to use your own research in those areas.

Networked control systems seem to be a popular research topic in the control engineering world these days, and one of the major headaches there seems to be the uncertain time delay that results from unreliable data networks. I haven't read enough to know how this is dealt with in practice, but I would guess some kind of ZOH handwaving is used to duct tape the problem.

The AO problem deals with time delays explicitly by predicting future outputs. This is possible since wavefronts exhibit some correlation so we can usually do better than pure guessing on average. Adaptive controllers work even better because the nature of the correlation is uncertain or changes over time.

NCS problems also have time delays, but the problem is exacerbated because the delay itself is unknown. On the other hand, would it be outrageous to assume that the delays might be correlated? If that's true, could you design an adaptive controller/observer that provided an estimate that performed better than ZOH?

In other words, could you consider random delays as simply changes to the PSD of the measured signal? If so, then an adaptive controller might have some promise.

Hmm, this could all be nonsense on second thought.