Formation Under Communication Constraints: Control Performance Meets Channel Capacity

In wireless communication-based formation control systems, the control performance is significantly impacted by the channel capacity of each communication link between agents. This relationship, however, remains under-investigated in the existing studies. To address this gap, the formation control problem of classical second-order multi-agent systems with bounded process noises was considered taking into account the channel capacity. More specifically, the model of communication links between agents is first established, based on a new concept – guaranteed communication region, which characterizes all possible locations for successful message decoding in the presence of control-system uncertainty. Furthermore, we rigorously prove that, the guaranteed communication region does not unboundedly increase with the transmission time, which indicates an important trade-off between the guaranteed communication region and the data rate. The fundamental limits of data rate for any desired accuracy are also obtained. Finally, an integrated design to achieve the desired formation accuracy is proposed, where an estimation-based controller and transmit power control strategy are developed.