Pseudo-perturbation-based Broadcast Control of Multi-agent Systems

Abstract

The present paper proposes a novel broadcast control (BC) law for multi-agent coordination. A BC framework has been developed to achieve global coordination tasks with low communication volume. The BC law uses broadcast communication, which transmits an identical signal to all agents indiscriminately without any agent-to-agent communication. Unfortunately, all of the agents are required to take numerous random actions because the BC law is based on stochastic optimization. Such random actions degrade the control performance for coordination tasks and may invoke dangerous situations. In order to overcome these drawbacks, the present paper proposes the pseudo-perturbation-based broadcast control (PBC) law, which introduces multiple virtual random actions instead of the single physical action of the BC law. The following advantages of the PBC law are theoretically proven. The PBC law achieves coordination tasks asymptotically with probability 1. Compared with the BC law, unavailing actions are reduced and agents' states converge at least twice as fast. Increasing the number of multiple actions further improves the control performance because averaging multiple actions reduces unavailing randomness. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the PBC improves the control performance as compared with the BC law.