Plenary talk the role of information theory in communication constrained control systems

Abstract

Communication is an important component of distributed, networked, and cooperative control systems. In most current systems the communication aspects are designed separately from the control aspects. Recently there has been an increasing interest in studying control systems employing multiple sensors and actuators that are geographically distributed. For these systems this design separation is no longer tenable. Hence there is a need for a unified view of control and communication. In this talk we discuss how tools from information theory can be used to develop such a view. Specifically we apply source coding, channel coding, binning, and coding with side-information techniques to a variety of control with communication problems including settings with non-traditional information patterns, multiple sensors, and multiple agents.