The Control Plant as A Communication Channel: Implicit Communication for Decentralized LQG Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces an innovative framework where a control plant acts as a communication channel, enabling decentralized agents to coordinate and reach a target state without explicit communication, using implicit encoding and decoding strategies.

Contribution

It proposes an integrated communication and control scheme leveraging joint source-channel coding ideas, with theoretical analysis and numerical validation for decentralized LQG control.

Findings

Follower's estimation error decreases monotonically to zero.

The scheme achieves a control cost close to the explicit-communication lower bound.

Optimal control conditions derived for fully actuated leader case.

Abstract

We study a decentralized linear quadratic Gaussian control problem, in which a leader and a follower must steer a linear system to a target state. The target state is known only to the leader, and no explicit communication channel exists between the agents. To address the challenge posed by this asymmetric information structure, we propose an integrated communication and control (ICoCo) framework in which the control plant itself serves as a communication channel: the leader encodes the target state into its control input through an additive communication term, and the follower decodes it from the resulting state trajectory. We design an implicit coordination scheme based on joint source-channel coding ideas, and prove that the follower's estimation error decreases monotonically to zero, enabling the two agents to coordinate increasingly well and ultimately steer the system to the target state. We then formulate the design of the communication power as an optimal control problem to minimize the overall control cost. In the fully actuated leader case, we derive necessary optimality conditions and in the under-actuated case, we solve the problem numerically. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme effectively coordinates the two agents and achieves a control cost close to that of the explicit-communication lower bound.