Distributed Interval Consensus of Multiagent Systems With a Pulse Width Modulation Protocol

Rather than the conventional pure consensus, this article proposes a pulsewidth modulation (PWM) protocol for an improved interval consensus of multiagent systems from the distributed perspective. In particular, the consensus of all the agents is achieved within a prescribed interval, which is merely available to partial agents, though. The PWM protocol effectively relieves the running burden of the agents without the additional analogue-to-digital conversion. The modulation periods of different agents are allowed to be heterogeneous. By nominating the agents that have access to the given interval as leaders and others as followers, the proposed distributed PWM protocol introduces a projection operator for the leaders in order for the collective aggregation. In terms of the graph connectivity condition of containing a spanning tree, it is shown that the concerned interval consensus objective is realized by the proposed distributed PWM protocol. Simulations are eventually performed to validate the established theoretical results.