RELAXED CONDITIONS FOR CONSENSUS IN MULTI-AGENT COORDINATION

This paper proposes relaxed suffient conditions for the consensus of multi-agent systems by the averaging protocols with time-varying system topology. Bidirectional information exchange between neighboring agents is considered and both the discrete-time and continuous-time consensus protocols are studied. It is shown that the consensus is reached if there exists an unbounded time sequence such that two agents who own the maximum and minimum states at each time instant in the sequence will be jointly connected at some future time. Further, this result is applied to the original nonlinear Vicsek model, and a sufficient condition for the heading consensus of the group with restricted initial conditions is obtained.

[1]  Gordon F. Royle,et al.  Algebraic Graph Theory , 2001, Graduate texts in mathematics.

[2]  L. Moreau,et al.  Stability of continuous-time distributed consensus algorithms , 2004, 2004 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37601).

[3]  Andrey V. Savkin,et al.  Coordinated collective motion of Groups of autonomous mobile robots: analysis of Vicsek's model , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[4]  R.W. Beard,et al.  Multi-agent Kalman consensus with relative uncertainty , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005, American Control Conference, 2005..

[5]  E.M. Atkins,et al.  A survey of consensus problems in multi-agent coordination , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005, American Control Conference, 2005..

[6]  Lei Guo,et al.  Connectivity and Synchronization of Multi-agent Systems , 2006, 2006 Chinese Control Conference.

[7]  A. S. Morse,et al.  Coordination of Groups of Mobile Autonomous Agents , 2004 .

[8]  Richard M. Murray,et al.  Consensus problems in networks of agents with switching topology and time-delays , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[9]  Zhong-Ping Jiang,et al.  On the Consensus of Dynamic Multi-agent Systems with Changing Topology , 2007, 2007 American Control Conference.

[10]  Huaiqing Wang,et al.  Multi-agent coordination using nearest neighbor rules: revisiting the Vicsek model , 2004, ArXiv.

[11]  Vicsek,et al.  Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles. , 1995, Physical review letters.

[12]  Richard M. Murray,et al.  INFORMATION FLOW AND COOPERATIVE CONTROL OF VEHICLE FORMATIONS , 2002 .

[13]  Luc Moreau,et al.  Stability of multiagent systems with time-dependent communication links , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[14]  Mireille E. Broucke,et al.  Local control strategies for groups of mobile autonomous agents , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[15]  V. Blondel,et al.  Convergence of different linear and non-linear Vicsek models , 2006 .

[16]  Randal W. Beard,et al.  Consensus seeking in multiagent systems under dynamically changing interaction topologies , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.