Reliable Formation Under TDMA Mechanism: Control-Communication Codesign

For formation control systems based on wireless communications, the communication interactions and control performance are highly coupled, while traditional methods do not take this coupling into account. To fill this gap, we study the formation control problem of second-order multiagent systems (MASs) with uncertain dynamics (affected by unknown but bounded (UBB) process noises) and commonly used time division multiple access (TDMA) communications. First, we establish the communication topology among agents as a periodically switching topology governed by precise switching mechanisms, which characterizes the effects of the TDMA mechanism, agent dynamics, and the physical layer of communications. Based on the communication model, we propose a control-communication codesign for MASs, where the delay-based formation controller and the distributed transmit power control algorithm are developed, to guarantee the bounded formation stability of control systems and reliable connections of the desired communication links simultaneously. The codesign framework systematically integrates formation control and communication transmission under physical layer constraints and provides a paradigm to better characterize the coupling relationship between communication interactions and control performance. Finally, experiments using realistic communication characteristics are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our codesign method.