Quantized Consensus And Containment Control Of Some Classes Of Multi-Agent Systems

Due to its wide applications in practice, the distributed coordination of multi-agent system has been an active area in the research of complex systems, and has received a great deal of attention of researchers from various disciplines. The main objective of distributed co-ordination of multi-agent systems is to make a group of agents coordinate their behavior and often cooperate to achieve some collective goal. Since digital systems are widely used in information transmission and processing, it is of great significance to study quantization effects on the system performance. This dissertation considers two classes of distributed coordination problems:quantized consensus and containment control problems. The main results and contributions of this dissertation include the following points.1. The quantized consensus problems of multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics are investigated. Distributed consensus protocols based on the logarithmic quantized relative state measurements of agents are proposed for first-order and second-order multi-agent sys-tems with nonlinear dynamics, respectively. By using nonsmooth analysis tools, some suf-ficient conditions are obtained for the consensus of multi-agent systems under continuous-time consensus protocols. Based on impulsive control theory, we prove that the multi-agent systems can reach consensus by choosing proper control gains and impulsive intervals under impulsive consensus protocols.2. The quantized consensus problems of heterogeneous multi-agent systems composed of first-order and second-order integrator agents are studied. Distributed consensus protocols based on the quantized relative positions and quantized absolute velocities of agents are pro-posed. It is shown that when logarithmic quantizers are used, the heterogeneous multi-agent system can reach consensus asymptotically. For the case of uniform quantizers, it is proved that the velocities of second-order agents converge to zero and the position differences of all the agents converge to a bounded set.3. The quantized consensus problems are considered for switched multi-agent systems, which are composed of a continuous-time and a discrete-time subsystem. Distributed con-sensus protocols based on the logarithmic quantized relative state measurements of agents are designed for first-order and second-order switched multi-agent systems, respectively. Some sufficient conditions are obtained for first-order switched multi-agent systems to achi-eve consensus under arbitrary switching. For second-order switched multi-agent systems, it is proved that for any given impulsive interval, all agents can achieve consensus by selecting appropriate control gain and sufficiently small quantizer accuracy.4. Containment control problems of switched multi-agent systems are investigated. Continu-ous-time and impulsive protocols based on the relative state measurements of agents are designed for the systems with multiple stationary and dynamic leaders, respectively. By using graph theory and stability theory, some sufficient and necessary conditions are derived for switched multi-agent systems to achieve containment control under arbitrary switching.