Cooperative control of discrete-time agents with delayed information exchange: A receding-horizon approach

Cooperative control by a team of distributed agents is considered in this paper. Each agent is assumed to evolve in discrete-time and exchange delayed state information with a subset of neighboring or cooperating agents. The control design formulation is based on the definition of a finite-horizon cost function that includes both the regulation and cooperation objectives. The cooperative control problem is formulated in a receding-horizon framework, where the control law can be explicitly broken up in two components: one due to feedback from the local state variables and the other based on delayed information gathered from cooperating neighboring agents. The global stability and performance analysis of the overall system is shown and simulation results are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.