One-bit consensus of controllable linear multi-agent systems with communication noises

Abstract

This paper addresses the one-bit consensus of controllable linear multi-agent systems (MASs) with communication noises. A consensus algorithm consisting of a communication protocol and a consensus controller is designed. The communication protocol introduces a linear compression encoding function to achieve a one-bit data rate, thereby saving communication costs. The consensus controller with a stabilization term and a consensus term is proposed to ensure the consensus of a potentially unstable but controllable MAS. Specifically, in the consensus term, we adopt an estimation method to overcome the information loss caused by one-bit communications and a decay step to attenuate the effect of communication noise. Two combined Lyapunov functions are constructed to overcome the difficulty arising from the coupling of the control and estimation. By establishing similar iterative structures of these two functions, this paper shows that the MAS can achieve consensus in the mean square sense at the rate of the reciprocal of the iteration number under the case with a connected fixed topology. Moreover, the theoretical results are generalized to the case with jointly connected Markovian switching topologies by establishing a certain equivalence relationship between the Markovian switching topologies and a fixed topology. Two simulation examples are given to validate the algorithm.