The automation of factories and manufacturing processes has been accelerating
over the past few years, boosted by the Industry 4.0 paradigm, including
diverse scenarios with mobile, flexible agents. Efficient coordination between
mobile robots requires reliable wireless transmission in highly dynamic
environments, often with strict timing requirements. Goal-oriented
communication is a possible solution for this problem: communication decisions
should be optimized for the target control task, providing the information that
is most relevant to decide which action to take. From the control perspective,
networked control design takes the communication impairments into account in
its optmization of physical actions. In this work, we propose a joint design
that combines goal-oriented communication and networked control into a single
optimization model, an extension of a multiagent POMDP which we call
Cyber-Physical POMDP (CP-POMDP). The model is flexible enough to represent
several swarm and cooperative scenarios, and we illustrate its potential with
two simple reference scenarios with a single agent and a set of supporting
sensors. Joint training of the communication and control systems can
significantly improve the overall performance, particularly if communication is
severely constrained, and can even lead to implicit coordination of
communication actions.

这篇论文提出了一种名为 “Cyber-Physical POMDP” 的模型，将目标导向通信和网络控制相结合，以实现分散的移动机器人的协调，通过联合训练可以显着提高总体性能并可导致通信行动的隐式协调。