Observer-Based Consensus Control for Discrete-Time Multiagent Systems With Coding–Decoding Communication Protocol

In this paper, the consensus control problem is investigated for a class of discrete-time networked multiagent systems (MASs) with the coding–decoding communication protocol (CDCP). Under a directed communication topology, an observer-based control scheme is proposed for each agent by utilizing the relative measurement outputs between the agent itself and its neighboring ones. The signal delivery is in a digital manner, which means that only the sequence of finite coded signals is sent from the observer to the controller. To be specific, the observed data is encoded to certain codewords by a designed coder via the CDCP, and the received codewords are then decoded by the corresponding decoder at the controller side. The purpose of the addressed problem is to design an observer-based controller such that the close-loop MAS achieves the expected consensus performance. First, with the help of the input-to-state stability theory, a theoretical framework for the detectability is established for analyzing and designing the CDCP. Then, under such a communication protocol, some sufficient conditions for the existence of the proposed observer-based controller are derived to guarantee the asymptotic consensus of the MASs. In addition, the controller parameter is explicitly determined in terms of the solution to certain matrix inequalities associated with the information of the communication topology. Finally, a simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed control strategy.