A wireless decentralized control experimental platform for vibration control of civil structures

Considerable achievements in developing structural regulators as an important method for vibration control have been made over the last few decades. The use of large quantities of cables in traditional wired control systems to connect sensors, controllers, and actuators makes the structural regulators complicated and expensive. A wireless decentralized control experimental platform based on Wi-Fi unit is designed and implemented in this study. Centralized and decentralized control strategies as sample controllers are employed in this control system. An optimal control algorithm based on Kalman estimator is embedded in the dSPACE controller and the DSP controller. To examine the performance of this control scheme, a three-story steel structure is developed with active mass dampers installed on each floor as the wireless communication platform. Experimental results show that the wireless decentralized control exhibits good control performance and has various potential applications in industrial control systems. The proposed experimental system may become a benchmark platform for the validation of the corresponding wireless control algorithm.