Pulse width modulation for multi-agent systems

This paper studies the consensus problem for multi-agent systems. A distributed consensus algorithm is developed by constructing homogeneous pulse width modulators for agents in the network. In particular, a certain percentage of the sampling period named duty cycle is modulated according to some state difference with respect to the neighbors at each sampling instant. During each duty cycle, the amplitude of the pulse is fixed. The proposed pulse width modulation scheme enables all agents to sample asynchronously with arbitrarily large sampling periods. It provides an alternative digital implementation strategy for multi-agent systems. We show that consensus is achieved asymptotically under the proposed scheme. The results are compared with the self-triggered ternary controller.