Coordination of Networked Multi-Agent Systems with Quantization and Link Failure

Coordination (cooperative control) is one of the central problems in networked multi-agent systems (NMASs). The objective of the coordination problem is to develop distributed algorithms that can be used by a group of agents to reach agreement on a common decision. Hence, communication between the agents is an important component of NMASs. Typical communication channels are directed, bandwidth limited and delayed. Limited channel capacity implies that the communicated signals are firstly quantized in order to be exchanged among the agents. However, most of the literature assume that each agent can receive perfect information from its neighbors through local communications. Thus there is a great demand to analyze and synthesize the dynamical behavior of NMASs with communication constraints.This project will study and develop novel robust approaches to the analysis and synthesis of NMASs by minimizing the adverse effects of the communication constraints including link failure, band-width limited and delayed information flow.