PFI-TT: Developing a Configurable Real-time High-speed Wireless Communication Platform for Large-scale Industrial Control Systems

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project is to enable the process industries to fully embrace the concept of Industry 4.0 and revamp their manufacturing plants as smart factories, where intelligent sensing and field devices are pervasively deployed and wirelessly connected in the field to provide real-time high-speed process monitoring, diagnosis and control. This paves the way for a better understanding of the manufacturing process, thereby enabling efficient and sustainable production. The commercial availability of low-cost, real-time and high-speed wireless technology will enable a wide range of new applications benefiting society in many ways. Just as ordinary WiFi technology has transformed the landscape of wireless communication for business use, our new real-time version of WiFi will enable industrial applications such as advanced process control and manufacturing, assistive tele-robotics, high-bandwidth health monitoring, autonomous vehicle safety assurance, and others. This PFI-TT project will also enable a comprehensive training program for future leaders in innovation and entrepreneurship to develop their ability to conduct innovative research projects as well as effective communication and entrepreneurial skills, and thus have significant educational and societal impacts.The proposed project will address the drawbacks of existing wireless communication networks, which are not equipped with providing either deterministic or high-speed real-time communication for large-scale industrial sensing and control systems. The proposed RT-WiFi protocol will 1) support up to 6kHz sampling rates that is sufficient for most industrial wireless applications, which require highly predictable performance; 2) offer the capability for extending to multi-cluster settings to cover large factories; 3) provide extremely high reliability through dynamic and distributed packet scheduling for autonomous adaptation to the noisy factory environment; and 4) tolerate any single point hardware/software failures with robust gateway design. It is envisioned that upon the successful completion of this project, a full-blown RT-WiFi communication system can be developed to support a large number of reliable and dynamic real-time flows in large-scale high-speed industrial wireless control networks. These unique features will make RT-WiFi an ideal communication infrastructure to support not only advanced process control systems, but also other fast growing industry segments in robotics, autonomous vehicles and high-speed mechanical processes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.