Event-Triggered Consensus of Nonlinear Agents with Quantized Broadcasts: A Hybrid System Approach

Information exchange among agents operating over a network, in practice, is restrained by limited communication bandwidth; this concern is often addressed by employing quantized broadcasts. In this paper, we study the problem of consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) over a directed network where the agents employ: a) encoders, that quantize relevant information prior to broadcasting, and b) decoders, that process this information upon arrival. The decision on the broadcast instant itself is made with the help of a dynamic event-triggering mechanism (ETM) in that the agents evaluate their respective event-triggering conditions intermittently at pre-designed sampling instants (which may be both aperiodic and asynchronous). Subsequently, the agents utilize model-based propagates of the decoded neighbor states in their control protocols to achieve consensus. The overall MAS is modeled using hybrid systems framework and the results are demonstrated through an illustrative example.