Saturated Sampled-Data Distributed Control for Interval Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems

This article studies the interval consensus of multi-agent systems using sampled data. Specifically, all the agents come to a consensus inside a given interval, which is only available to a portion of agents. The network is characterized by a strongly connected directed topology. By considering generic saturations with heterogeneity and asymmetry, two sampled-data distributed control protocols are proposed, which allow asynchronous sampling such that a global clock synchronization mechanism is not required. To be specific, with the delivery of the interval projection information, a saturated sampled-data distributed control protocol is first proposed. Accompanied by it, a selection criterion for sampling periods is built to achieve the interval consensus. Next, by narrowing down possible input options to three, another sampled-data distributed control protocol with ternary input options is proposed. A proper excitation mechanism is designed such that the interval consensus objective is achieved without strict requirements on the sampling periods. Simulation examples are taken to verify the established theoretical results.