Consensus in multi-agent systems with communication constraints. (English) Zbl 1244.93018

Wen, Guanghui; Duan, Zhisheng; Yu, Wenwu; Chen, Guanrong

Int. J. Robust Nonlinear Control 22, No. 2, 170-182 (2012).

Summary: The problem of second-order consensus is investigated in this paper for a class of multi-agent systems with a fixed directed topology and communication constraints where each agent is assumed to share information only with its neighbors on some disconnected time intervals. A novel consensus protocol designed based on synchronous intermittent local information feedback is proposed to coordinate the states of agents to converge to second-order consensus under a fixed strongly connected topology, which is then extended to the case where the communication topology contains a directed spanning tree. By using tools from algebraic graph theory and Lyapunov control approach, it is proved that second-order consensus can be reached if the general algebraic connectivity of the communication topology is larger than a threshold value and the mobile agents communicate with their neighbors frequently enough as the network evolves. Finally, a numerical example is simulated to verify the theoretical analysis.

MSC:

93A15	Large-scale systems
94A05	Communication theory
05C90	Applications of graph theory
68M14	Distributed systems

Keywords:

multi-agent system; second-order consensus; communication constraint; directed spanning tree

Software:

Boids

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