A Control-Theoretic Approach to Distributed Discrete-Valued Decision-Making in Networks of Sensing Agents

We address the problem of global sensor fusion for the purpose of distributed decision-making, from a control-theoretic perspective. In particular, we introduce a quasi-linear stochastic dis-tributed protocol, using which a network of sensing agents can reach agreement in order to take a collective action. Using control-theoretic methods, we design the parameters of our protocol— which include weights in the local update rules used by the agents and a finite stopping time—to achieve agreement in a fair and rapid manner. We show analytically that the developed protocol achieves fair agreement with certainty in the noise-free case, and achieves fair agreement with high probability even in the presence of communication noise and assuming very little information stor-age capability for the agents. Our development is illustrated throughout with a canonical example motivated by autonomous vehicle control