Multi-agent trajectory tracking with self-triggered cloud access

This paper presents a cloud-supported control algorithm for coordinated trajectory tracking of networked autonomous agents. The motivating application is the coordinated control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. The control objective is to have the vehicles track a reference trajectory while keeping an assigned formation. Rather than relying on inter-agent communication, which is interdicted underwater, coordination is achieved by letting the agents intermittently access a shared information repository hosted on a cloud. An event-based law is proposed to schedule the accesses of each agent to the cloud. We show that, with the proposed scheduling of the cloud accesses, the agents achieve the required coordination objective. Numerical simulations corroborate the theoretical results.