Leader-Follower-Based Self-Triggered Consensus Control of Industrial Induction Motor Drives

Alternating current motors are critical to industry, as they drive many machines in the manufacturing and processing industries. To accomplish heavy tasks, often, a number of small motors must operate cooperatively, which means that the operation of the motors must be coordinated using, for example, consensus control. To accomplish this, the motors must communicate with each other. This communication can be periodic or event driven. As periodic communication may waste communication resources when no control update is needed, we propose a need-based self-triggered communication (STC) mechanism to achieve improved communication efficiency. We propose an STC technique for the leader-follower-based consensus control of induction motors. To study this method, we developed both centralized and distributed STC models. In the centralized approach, each motor is connected to a central unit that calculates the next communication time. When distributed STC is used, each motor calculates the next communication time solely based on information from directly connected neighboring motors, thus eliminating the possibility of a single point of failure. Extensive simulations were conducted to validate the proposed approaches. Our results show that the proposed self-triggered consensus control technique gets the same level of performance as a standard periodic control approach while utilizing fewer communication resources.