Control of multi-agent systems with event-triggered cloud access

This paper investigates a multi-agent formation control problem with event-triggered control updates and additive disturbances. The agents communicate only by exchanging information in a cloud repository. The communication with the cloud is considered a shared and limited resource, and therefore it is used intermittently and asynchronously by the agents. The proposed approach takes advantage of having a shared asynchronous cloud support while guaranteeing a reduced number of communication. More in detail, each agent schedules its own sequence of cloud accesses in order to achieve a coordinated network goal. A control law is given with a criterion for scheduling the control updates recursively. The closed loop scheme is proven to be effective in achieving the control objective and a numerical simulation corroborates the theoretical results.