The Control Plant as A Communication Channel: Implicit Communication for Decentralized LQG Control

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Chen, Gongpu, Gündüz, Deniz
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866914527319162880
author Chen, Gongpu
Gündüz, Deniz
author_facet Chen, Gongpu
Gündüz, Deniz
contents We study a decentralized linear quadratic Gaussian control problem, in which a leader and a follower must steer a linear system to a target state. The target state is known only to the leader, and no explicit communication channel exists between the agents. To address the challenge posed by this asymmetric information structure, we propose an integrated communication and control (ICoCo) framework in which the control plant itself serves as a communication channel: the leader encodes the target state into its control input through an additive communication term, and the follower decodes it from the resulting state trajectory. We design an implicit coordination scheme based on joint source-channel coding ideas, and prove that the follower's estimation error decreases monotonically to zero, enabling the two agents to coordinate increasingly well and ultimately steer the system to the target state. We then formulate the design of the communication power as an optimal control problem to minimize the overall control cost. In the fully actuated leader case, we derive necessary optimality conditions and in the under-actuated case, we solve the problem numerically. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme effectively coordinates the two agents and achieves a control cost close to that of the explicit-communication lower bound.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_01903
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Control Plant as A Communication Channel: Implicit Communication for Decentralized LQG Control
Chen, Gongpu
Gündüz, Deniz
Optimization and Control
Systems and Control
We study a decentralized linear quadratic Gaussian control problem, in which a leader and a follower must steer a linear system to a target state. The target state is known only to the leader, and no explicit communication channel exists between the agents. To address the challenge posed by this asymmetric information structure, we propose an integrated communication and control (ICoCo) framework in which the control plant itself serves as a communication channel: the leader encodes the target state into its control input through an additive communication term, and the follower decodes it from the resulting state trajectory. We design an implicit coordination scheme based on joint source-channel coding ideas, and prove that the follower's estimation error decreases monotonically to zero, enabling the two agents to coordinate increasingly well and ultimately steer the system to the target state. We then formulate the design of the communication power as an optimal control problem to minimize the overall control cost. In the fully actuated leader case, we derive necessary optimality conditions and in the under-actuated case, we solve the problem numerically. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme effectively coordinates the two agents and achieves a control cost close to that of the explicit-communication lower bound.
title The Control Plant as A Communication Channel: Implicit Communication for Decentralized LQG Control
topic Optimization and Control
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01903