Effectiveness of Information Transfer on Control Quality of CSMA/CA-Based Autonomous Decentralized Control

Abstract

In autonomous decentralized control of mobile agents such as robots and drones, packet loss that occurs in wireless communication has a significant impact on control performance. This paper proposes a simple information transfer method for CSMA/CA(Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance)-based autonomous decentralized control to compensate for information lost due to communication failures. We evaluate the effectiveness of information transfer on control performance in two typical classes of autonomous decentralized control, i.e., consensus control and covered control, by computer simulation, and show that the improvement of control quality can be achieved regardless of the number of controlled agents and the contention window size of CSMA/CA.