Broadcast Feedback of Large-Scale, Distributed Stochastic Control Systems Inspired by Biological Muscle Control

This paper presents a broadcast feedback approach to the distributed stochastic control of an actuator system consisting of many cellular units. This control architecture was inspired by skeletal muscles comprising a vast number of tiny functional units, called sarcomeres. The output of the actuator system is an aggregate effect of numerous cellular units, each taking a bistable on-off state. A central controller "broadcasts" the error between the aggregate output and a reference input. Rather than dictating the individual units to take specific states, the central controller merely broadcasts the overall error signal to all the cellular units uniformly. In turn each cellular unit makes a stochastic decision with a state transition probability, which is modulated in relation to the broadcasted error. Stability conditions of the broadcast feedback system are obtained by using a stochastic Lyapunov function. It is demonstrated that, even in the absence of deterministic coordination, the ensemble of the cellular units can track a given trajectory stably and robustly.