Wireless control of a coupled tanks system: A case study

Wireless technologies have attracted the attention of the industrial sector, due to their multiple advantages such as ease of installation, flexibility and mobility. However, the application of wireless in industry is most limited to non-critical sensing applications, making the communication of critical instruments and control systems almost exclusively with wired media. Despite this, wireless technologies and control techniques are evolving, still presenting open issues and challenges for academia and industry, so new solutions and studies are required. In this paper, we present our experiences on enabling wireless control of a coupled tanks system available at the University of the Bío-Bío, Chile. As most of the existing control systems, such a plant is connected through analog wired links. We changed this by incorporating low-power wireless modules for communicating sensor and control data. Our first results show that, for the considered case study, the use of wireless communications for control is feasible, even approaching the behavior of the wired version (with some restrictions). The implementation will be available remotely for use, allowing people from all over the world testing new approaches in wireless networked control systems.