On the compression of locational and environmental data in multi-vehicle missions: A control systems approach

Mobile agents that take part in multi-vehicle missions usually need to share environmental and locational information with other agents and with control stations through a communication channel. In real scenarios, the agents have to deal with different communication issues, such as interference, loss of connectivity and unexpected reduction of available bandwidth. One way to overcome these issues is by minimising the amount of data in the communication channel, which not only speeds up the sharing of information, but would also avoid the loss of data. We propose a control systems approach that allows the compression of the shared information. Given some problem-dependent mathematical assumptions, our method aims to simplify the calculation of the stationary errors by computing the sign of the errors rather than their exact values and the control law may then be used to stabilise the system. The approach allows for the compression of the outputs involved in the calculation of the errors as such outputs represent the shared information among agents. We carry out the theoretical analysis of our approach and apply it to two case studies, namely a formation control and a coverage control with consensus. We finally validate our theoretical results through simulations in Matlab.