Internet-like protocols for the control and coordination of multiple agents with time delay

The coordination of multiple systems presents unique challenges and remains a worthy goal in situations where humans need to project efforts and control over large distances. Particularly challenging problems arise when multiple robots are used in space applications to construct large space structures or to manipulate material. For example, various teleautonomous applications have been proposed (see [15], [17]) to assist in the construction of space systems meant to provide beamed power for commercial applications [16]. While the physics and economics of such systems are being worked out, our particular research focuses on the distributed, coordinated, and robust control of multiple agents representing robots engaged in an assembly task in space. The idea of internet-like protocols in control can be applied to such systems in which a group of n users (clients) share a common resource (server)of finite capacity C. While Information systems such as the Internet are only concerned with transferring the information (with high fidelity), networked control applications are more involved due to the effects that dated information has on the control of dynamical systems [9], [10], [11], [12], [13]. To quote Traub [14], information is “incomplete, priced, and corrupted”. However, and for control purposes, it is also “timed”. To make the general idea of Internet-like control more precise, we consider a network of n users of a resource C. If for user i, the state variable xi represents its usage of the resource, then, it is desired that the system reaches the equilibrium point at which