Observer-based Control of Multi-agent Systems under STL Specifications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized control framework for heterogeneous multi-agent systems that ensures STL task satisfaction despite disturbances and limited communication, using a novel k-hop PPSO for state estimation.

Contribution

It proposes a decentralized k-hop PPSO for state estimation and integrates it into STL-based control to handle non-communicating agents and disturbances.

Findings

The framework guarantees STL satisfaction under worst-case estimation errors.

Simulation validates the effectiveness of the proposed control and estimation scheme.

Abstract

This paper proposes a decentralized controller for large-scale heterogeneous multi-agent systems subject to bounded external disturbances, where agents must satisfy Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications requiring cooperation among non-communicating agents. To address the lack of direct communication, we employ a decentralized k-hop Prescribed Performance State Observer (k-hop PPSO) to provide each agent with state estimates of those agents it cannot communicate with. By leveraging the performance bounds on the state estimation errors guaranteed by the k-hop PPSO, we first modify the space robustness of the STL tasks to account for these errors, and then exploit the modified robustness to design a decentralized continuous-time feedback controller that ensures satisfaction of the STL tasks even under worst-case estimation errors. A simulation result is provided to validate the proposed framework.