Formation-Control Stability and Communication Capacity of Multiagent Systems: A Joint Analysis

Abstract

The focus of this study is a joint analysis of the stability of formation control and the capacity of wireless communications between agents moving in a formation. The main results derived in this study show a connection between the second moment stability/convergence of formation control and the expected capacity of the data communications for multiagent systems in which the collective behavior of the multiple agents is dominated by formation control with random errors. More specifically, by developing a joint control-communication framework for the performance analysis, we investigate whether random errors in the formation control have a destructive influence on the data communications between agents. We prove that the expected capacity of the multiagent data communication link has a nonvanishing lower bound that can be evaluated through second moment performance analysis. The results from simulations indicate that the theoretical analysis provides reasonable lower bounds for different system parameters.