Revision with unchanged content. Rapid advances in information
processing, communication and sensing technologies have enabled more and
more devices to be provided with embedded processors, networking
capabilities and sensors. For the field of estimation and control, it is
now possible to consider an architecture in which many simple components
communicate and cooperate to achieve a joint team goal. This distributed
architecture promises much in terms of performance, reliability and
simplicity of design. However, at the same time, it requires extending
the traditional theories of control, communication and computation and,
in fact, looking at a unified picture of the three fields. The chief
idea explored in this book is the joint design of information flow and
the control law. While traditional control design has concentrated on
calculating the optimal control input by assuming a particular
information flow between the components, our approach seeks to
synthesize the optimal information flow along with the optimal control
law that satisfies the constraints of the information flow. As we
demonstrate in the book, the joint design of information flow and the
optimal control input satisfying the constraints of that information
flow yields large improvements in performance over simply trying to fit
traditional design theories on distributed systems.
