An Energy-Efficient Event-Based MIMO Communication Scheme for UAV Formation Control

Abstract: We consider a leader-follower formation control setup as an example for a multi-agent networked control system (NCS). This paper proposes an event-based wireless communication scheme with a MIMO precoder, that dynamically adapts to both the channel and the current control state. We apply a Lyapunov drift approach for optimizing the precoder and for defining an event-triggering policy. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, we simulate a formation control of two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) connected via a point-to-point MIMO fading channel. Compared to a benchmark scheme with periodic transmissions and a basic water-filling algorithm, we demonstrate that our proposed event-based scheme is more efficient by consuming less energy and requiring less frequent transmissions on average.