Decentralized Cooperative Control in Degraded Communication Environments

Abstract We compute transmission rates and delays that provably stabilize multiagent systems (MASs) in the presence of disturbances and noise. Namely, given the existing information delay among the agents and the underlying communication topology, we determine the rates at which information between the agents needs to be exchanged such that the MAS of interest is L p -stable with bias, where this bias accounts for noisy data. To consider MASs characterized by sets of equilibrium points, the notions of L p -stability (with bias) and L p -detectability with respect to a set are employed. Using arguments of the Lyapunov-Razumikhin type, we are able to consider delays greater than the transmission intervals. Our method is applicable to general (not merely to single- and double-integrator) heterogeneous linear agents, directed topologies, and output feedback. The computed transmission rates are experimentally verified by use of a group of off-the-shelf quadcopters.