Fully Event-Driven Control Architecture, Application to Visual Servoing of a Ball-on-Beam System

Nowadays, controlled systems with constant time sampling are widely spread. Conversely, the event-triggered paradigm is highly appealing since it promises to reduce computation and data flow when the dynamics of the system requires little or no control update, while allowing more intense refresh during transition phases. The objective here is to extend this opportunity and to design a fully event-based control architecture by considering not only the controller but the whole sensorimotor chain from perception to action, with the hope of even better gains in resource utilization. The targeted application is the visual servoing of a ball-on-beam system. The proposal includes a visual sensor, perception and control algorithms, as well as an actuator, all of which being event driven. Moreover, the proposed strategy is implemented on an embedded CPU-based platform. Beyond the innovative design, experimental results highlight savings in computational cost and bandwidth, with even slightly better performances.