Multi-agent coordination with asynchronous cloud access

Cameron Nowzari, George J. Pappas

Abstract: In this work we study a multi-agent coordination problem in which agents are only able to communicate intermittently with the cloud. To minimize the amount of required communication, we are interested in developing a self-triggered algorithm that determines when communication with the cloud is necessary. Unlike the overwhelming majority of similar works that propose distributed event- and/or self-triggered control laws, this work doesn't assume agents can be `listening' continuously. In other words, when an event is triggered by one agent, neighboring agents will not be aware of this until the next time they establish communication with the cloud. Each time an agent communicates with the cloud, it must determine the next time to reestablish communication while guaranteeing the completion of some global task. We show that our self-triggered coordination algorithm guarantees that the system asymptotically reaches the set of desired states. Simulations illustrate our results.