Output Synchronization of Multi-Agent Systems with Event-Driven Communication: Communication Delay and Signal Quantization

In this paper, we study the output synchronization problem of multi-agent systems with event-driven communication, in which the data transmissions among neighboring agents are event-based rather than pre-scheduled periodically. We propose a set-up for the coupled agents to achieve output synchronization with event-driven communication in the presence of constant communication delays by using scattering transformation. Thus, whenever the agent satisfies its triggering condition, a scattering variable which contains the current output information of the agent will be sent to its corresponding neighbors, and the neighbors will extract reference information from its received scattering variables for its own control action update. Quantization effects on output synchronization with event-driven communication have also been studied. The result presented in the current paper is an important extension of applying event-driven communication to control of multi-agent systems, especially when it is difficult to derive a common upper bound on the admissible network induced delays based on the event-triggering condition or when the network induced delays between coupled agents are larger than the inter-event time implicitly determined by the event triggering condition. Index Terms output synchronization, event-driven communication, quantization effects, communication delay, passivity, graph theory, control of multi-agent systems