Robust Control Invariance for Networked Control Systems with Output Feedback

This paper focuses on robust output feedback design for multi-agent networked control systems with a shared communication medium, where each system is subject to state and input constraints. We first compute the communication demand for each system given constant observer and controller gains; we argue that minimization of the communication demand with respect to the control or observer gains is very hard. Then, given a constant observer gain, we compute the minimum communication demand for each system and a corresponding control policy using model predictive control; we argue that the second approach is less difficult to solve and results in a communication demand which is no larger than for a linear controller. We illustrate and compare these design methods by a numerical example.