Communication-Efficient Event-Triggered Time-Delay Control and Its Application to Robot Manipulators

This article proposes a communication-efficient event-triggered time-delay control (ET-TDC) scheme, which is more intelligent, consumes fewer network resources, and is more suitable for practical applications, such as network control systems over bandwidth-limited communication channels. The proposed controller ensures a fast convergence rate and high tracking performance because it is based on TDCs that are well known for achieving high tracking performance. To maintain these properties, the proposed control scheme adopts a performance-preserving ET strategy, whereby the communication effort between the controllers and actuators can be significantly reduced. The ET condition of the proposed controller is devised to ensure system stability by using a Lyapunov function. Finally, the performance of the proposed ET-TDC is demonstrated through a numerical simulation and an experiment using a two-link robot manipulator.