Consensus Behavior of Multi-Agent Systems Under Digital Network Topology

This paper works on the consensus behavior of multi-agent systems under digital network topology. It is assumed that the agents are distributed on a plane and communicate through a digital network topology. The location coordinates of each agent are measured by some remote sensors and transmitted digitally to its neighbors. The control protocol is designed by using the exact discrete state of neighbors and the dynamics of each agent is described by a hybrid system. It is shown that the whole multi-agent system may exhibit not only aggregation but also divergence and periodic oscillation, which are depended on dynamic property of each agent and the sampling time period, as well as the algebraic characterization of network topology. Moreover, we give the accurate algebraic discriminant among them. Examples show the effectiveness of our theoretical results.