The Networked Control System Lab (NCS-Lab) at the Institute of Communications Technology is a testbed used to implement and evaluate network and control solutions. Networked control systems are distributed systems in which the communication between sensors, actuators, and controllers occurs through a shared band-limited digital communication network. The modelling and analysis of networked control systems have received considerable attention in the last two decades. The main challenge in such systems involves the interaction of a possibly large number of control loops, which are controlled via shared network resources. An example is the control of a robot based on visual sensor information, which is processed in the cloud and can be used to regulate the control variables. The research questions concern the estimation and compensating delays and packet loss, as they occur on the public Internet or occur in wireless local area networks.
The NCS-Lab consists of two Robot-Arms (universal robots UR-5e) with control boxes, one qb SoftHand, one robotiq wrist camera and two mobiles office racks 12 HE consisting of Cisco SG350 gigabit switches and Dell PowerEdge R7515 servers.
Regarding some of the teaching activities, the NCS-Lab provides students with a real experimental environment enabling them to investigate the relation between the practical and theoretical world and have a visual look at the results. Some HiWi-experiments, bachelor projects, master thesis can be carried out in this testbed.
