NCSbench Demo: Reproducible Benchmarking Platform for Networked Control Systems

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are widely spreading thanks to fast-paced technological breakthroughs of microcontrollers and communication networks. Among them, Networked Control Systems (NCS) gained notable attention thanks to their application in industrial operations. In NCS, the interconnection of a control logic with sensors and actuators used to steer a physical system occurs over a communication network. Despite large research interest on NCS, the reproducibility and comparison of experimental results are difficult to achieve. This is caused by the lack of well-established models and methodologies that combine the theoretical and practical aspects of NCS. We tackle this problem by proposing and demonstrating NCSbench: the first open-source reproducible benchmarking platform for NCS. NCSbench enables the benchmarking of research experiments using a networked two-wheeled inverted pendulum robot. For each benchmarking experiment, a set of values is measured and used to quantify the key performance indicators (KPIs) of the NCS. In our demonstration, we visualize in real-time the evolution of the benchmarking KPIs on a web-based Graphical User Interface.