Creation of a Wireless Networked Control System using XBee antennae and LabView

Abstract

This paper focuses on wireless controlled network systems and investigates the viable solutions for wireless communication in an industrial setting. The wireless communication offers several challenges such as finding the optimal sampling period, analyzing message delay, reducing message dropout and keeping the power consumption low. This work will not give a working solution but will draw conclusion about using XBee antennae for the wireless communication compared to wired communication, and LabVIEW for programming the control loop. Since it was impossible to physically close the loop it was chosen to test the characteristics that are important for a control loop. Several experiments were designed to compare the two modes of communication. A first experiment pointed out that the ADC of the Arduino in combination with the XBee for transmitting was the most optimal solution. The next experiments were done with this configuration to investigate the message delay and message dropout caused by several factors. In general, it can be concluded that for none critical systems or monitoring, the XBee provides a sufficient solution. For more critical solutions it is recommended to improve several factors of the configuration used in this work such as a different baud-rate, using a real-time operating system, controlling the environment to reduce interference, and using a better ADC.