Consensus of multiagent with interaction distortions via echo control

Abstract

This paper studies the discrete-time multiagent consensus problem with kinds of diverse interaction distortions which are related to the states of agents, and a novel dual switching control strategy is proposed, named echo control, to make the system achieve state consensus. The main feature of the echo control strategy is that agents resend the information flows (received from neighbors) to the corresponding neighbor, just like the reflecting of sound waves. In other words, every individual under the echo control strategy is not only the sender and receiver of the information flows, but also the reflector of its neighbors’ messages. In this way, a negative feedback loop is constructed between every two agents, which is designed to ensure the stability of the multiagent system (MAS), and then the agents’ states will converge to a common value. The effectiveness of the echo control protocol is theoretically analyzed, and numerical simulations validate the correctness of the relevant results.