A Conservation-Based Distributed Control Architecture for Network Consensus with Stochastic Communication Uncertainty

Abstract

Due to advances in embedded computational resources over the last several years, a considerable research effort has been devoted to the control of networks and control over networks. Network systems involve distributed decision-making for coordination of networks of dynamic agents and address a broad area of applications including cooperative control of unmanned air vehicles, microsatellite clusters, mobile robotics, battle space management, and congestion control in communication networks. In this paper, we develop a conservation-based framework for addressing almost sure consensus problems for nonlinear stochastic multiagent dynamical systems with fixed communication topologies. Specifically, we present a distributed nonlinear controller architectures for multiagent coordination over networks with state-dependent stochastic communication uncertainty. The proposed controller architecture involves the exchange of generalized charge or energy between agents guaranteeing that the closed-loop dynamical network is stochastically semistable to an equipartitioned equilibrium representing a state of almost sure consensus consistent with basic thermodynamic principles.