Structurally Observable Distributed Networks of Agents Under Cost and Robustness Constraints

Abstract

In many problems, agents cooperate locally so that a leader or fusion center can infer the state of every agent from probing the state of only a small number of agents. Versions of this problem arise when a fusion center reconstructs an extended physical field by accessing the state of just a few of the sensors measuring the field, or a leader monitors the formation of a team of robots. Given a link cost, the paper presents a polynomial time algorithm to design a minimum cost coordinated network dynamics followed by the agents, under an observability constraint. The problem is placed in the context of structural observability and solved even when up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math></inline-formula> agents in the coordinated network dynamics fail.