Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication for Consensus Control in Multi-Agent Systems

A scenario of multiple agents working together to accomplish a common task is considered. Consensus control facilitates the coordination among the agents over time till they accomplish the task. In this paper, we consider formation control using consensus in which agents coordinate to form a circle. To make the coordination possible, agents need to periodically exchange their positions using orthogonal transmissions through a band-limited wireless channel which encounters different transmission delays on different links. To guarantee over all agents stability and convergence, we optimize the bandwidth allocation for equal rate transmission, which maintains the synchronization among agents. Moreover, we minimize the convergence time by optimizing the weights of the consensus algorithm. An ultra-reliable low latency communication between agents is guaranteed by transmitting short packets. The simulation results show that jointly optimizing the confidence weights and bandwidth allocation greatly reduces the convergence time as compared to conventional schemes.