Design of the communication structure of a self-organizing networked controller for heterogeneous agents

This paper concerns the design of the communication structure of a self-organizing networked controller of multi-agent systems. The agents have individual dynamics, are unidirectionally coupled within a basic communication structure and have to follow a command signal. To avoid large control errors and to simultaneously reduce the communication effort, the agents request additional information from other agents, only if their local control error exceeds a given bound. As a consequence, the communication topology of the overall system is adjusted to the current control task and, as a result of the self-organization, presents an image of the currently acting command signal. A quantitative bound of the control error is used to develop an algorithm for designing the communication structure and the activation condition for the information request. The approach is demonstrated by its application to a robot formation problem.