Team-triggered coordination for real-time control of networked cyber-physical systems

Abstract: This paper studies the real-time implementation of distributed controllers on networked cyber-physical systems. We build on the strengths of event- and self-triggered control to synthesize a unified approach, termed team-triggered, where agents make promises to one another about their future states and are responsible for warning each other if they later decide to break them. The information provided by these promises allows individual agents to autonomously schedule information requests in the future and sets the basis for maintaining desired levels of performance at lower implementation cost. We establish provably correct guarantees for the distributed strategies that result from the proposed approach and examine their robustness against delays, packet drops, and communication noise. The results are illustrated in simulations of a multi-agent formation control problem.