Cooperative Control of Mobile Autonomous Agents via Communication Routing

Cooperative control of mobile autonomous agents relies on interagent communication, while most existing studies are concerned with local information exchange between neighbors. In addition to local information exchange, global information exchange, e.g., via communication routing, is also an important approach, that might have the advantage of accelerating the convergence of cooperative control. However, there are few works on the joint design and analysis of cooperative control and communication routing for mobile autonomous agents. In this paper, we propose a technique which realizes the cooperative control of mobile autonomous agents by incorporating communication routing. To be specific, we first design a control law combining local and global information exchange. Then, considering the delay caused by routing, we analyze the convergence performance of above control law by using a frequency-domain method for time-delay systems, which shows that the convergence rate of the control law we designed is faster than that only with distributed control or routing. Finally, simulations are provided to validate the theoretical results.