Over-the-Air Consensus-based Formation Control of Heterogeneous Agents: Communication-Rate and Geometry-Aware Convergence Guarantees

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel formation control method for heterogeneous agents using wireless superposition, providing convergence guarantees based on communication rate and geometry, with reduced communication overhead demonstrated through simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a superposition-based communication scheme for formation control, offering convergence guarantees and a geometry-aware refinement to relax communication requirements.

Findings

Guaranteed convergence under certain communication rates.

Reduced number of transmissions compared to traditional methods.

Simulations confirm theoretical results with unicycle agents.

Abstract

This paper investigates the formation control problem of heterogeneous, autonomous agents that communicate over a wireless multiple access channel. Instead of avoiding interference through orthogonal node-to-node transmissions, we exploit the superposition property of the wireless channel to compute, at each receiver, normalized convex combinations of simultaneously broadcast neighbor signals. At every communication instant, agents update their reference positions from these aggregates, and track the references in continuous time between updates. The only assumption on the agent dynamics is that each agent tracks constant reference positions exponentially, which accommodates a broad class of platforms. Under this assumption, we analyze the resulting jump-flow system under time-varying communication graphs and unknown channel coefficients. We derive a communication-rate based sufficient condition that guarantees convergence to a prescribed formation. We then provide a geometry-aware refinement showing how favorable tracking transients can relax the required condition. Simulations with unicycle agents illustrate the theoretical results and demonstrate a substantial reduction in the number of required orthogonal transmissions compared to interference-avoiding node-to-node communication protocols.