Cooperative Consensus-based Control of Multiagent Systems over Wireless Channels

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In the first phase of this project, we have investigated synergiesbetween communication and consensus seeking. In a scenario, wheremultiple agents aim at achieving consensus over a wireless channel, wehave designed and evaluated distributed algorithms that exploit thesuperposition property of the wireless channel for functioncomputation. These allow for a significant increase in resource, andin particular energy efficiency. This directly affects two majortrade-offs that we plan to investigate in the context ofconsensus-based formation control: (i) frequency and accuracy ofinformation exchange over wireless channels are directly related. In aformation control scenario, this may imply that in certain situations(e.g., when agents are about to collide and rapid reactions arerequired), the former may have to be increased at the cost of thelatter. To exploit this trade-off, we will investigate event-triggeredbroadcast-based communication architectures. (ii) Increasing transmitpower will in general improve connectivity of the network. The formerimplies an increase in energy consumption for individual broadcasts,whereas the latter may lead to more rapid convergence and therefore asmaller number of required broadcasts. The use of this trade-off information control problems by adapting transmit power will also beformally investigated. In addition to harnessing interference, we aimat taking advantage of (possibly hidden) structures in signalstransmitted by different agents. The knowledge of such spatio-temporalstructures can, for example, be utilized for compressing sparsesignals before transmission, or recovering more accurate informationfrom noisy transmissions, hence reducing the amount of informationexchanged over the resource-limited wireless channels. Finally, weintend to demonstrate the applicability of our concepts byinvestigating a practical formation control problem. The individualagents are specifically designed wheeled robots with nonholonomicdynamics that can be equipped with radio transceivers. To exploitinterference of signals on the physical layer, we will employanalog-based Full-Duplex systems.