Decentralised information gathering with communication costs

Advantages of decentralised decision making systems for multi-agent robotic tasks are limited by the heavy demand they impose on communication. This paper presents an approach to control communication for the LQ team problem, namely a team of agents with linear dynamics and quadratic team cost. Communication costs are added to the objective of the LQ optimal control linear matrix inequality formulation, allowing for a well-defined balancing of communication costs and team performance. Results show a reduction in communication consistent with the specified cost and in a manner that upholds team performance relative to the reduced communication footprint. The applicability of the approach has also been extended to information gathering tasks through local LQ approximations along the agents´ paths. Simulation testing on a sample two-agent problem shows a 40% reduction in communication with negligible impact on performance.