Experimenting with networked control software subject to faults

Faults and errors are common in the execution of digital controllers on top of embedded hardware. Researchers from the embedded system domain devised models to understand and bound the occurrence of these faults. Using these models, control researchers have demonstrated robustness properties of control systems, and of their corresponding digital implementations. In this paper, we build a framework to experiment with the injection of faults in a networked control system that regulates the behaviour of a Furuta pendulum. We use the software framework to experiment on computational problems that cause the control signals not to be available on time, and network faults that cause dropped packets during the transmission of sensor data and actuator commands.