Communication-Aware Dissipative Output Feedback Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a communication-aware output feedback control design that reduces online communication in large-scale networks by leveraging dissipativity properties, ensuring robustness and applicability to heterogeneous nonlinear agents.

Contribution

It presents a generalized well-posedness condition, a convex relaxation for stability inference, and a synthesis algorithm combining Network Dissipativity Theorem, ADMM, and convex overbounding.

Findings

Effective control design for heterogeneous networks with uncertain agents.

Reduced communication controllers that maintain robustness.

Comparison shows improved efficiency over standard  control.

Abstract

Communication-aware control is essential to reduce costs and complexity in large-scale networks. This work proposes a method to design dissipativity-augmented output feedback controllers with reduced online communication. The contributions of this work are three fold: a generalized well-posedness condition for the controller network, a convex relaxation for the constraints that infer stability of a network from dissapativity of its agents, and a synthesis algorithm integrating the Network Dissipativity Theorm, alternating direction method of multipliers, and iterative convex overbounding. The proposed approach yields a sparsely interconnected controller that is both robust and applicable to networks with heterogeneous nonlinear agents. The efficiency of these methods is demonstrated on heterogeneous networks with uncertain and unstable agents, and is compared to standard $\cH_\infty$ control.