Coordination of multi-agent systems with intermittent access to a cloud repository

Abstract

A cloud-supported multi-agent system is composed of autonomous agents required to achieve a common coordination objective by exchanging data over a shared cloud repository. The repository is accessed asychronously by different agents, and direct inter-agent commuication is not possible. This model is motivated by the problem of coordinating a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles, with the aim to avoid the use of expensive and power-hungry modems for underwater communication. For the case of agents with integrator dynamics, a control law and a rule for scheduling the cloud access are formally defined and proven to achieve the desired coordination. A numerical simulation corroborate the theoretical results.