Average consensus of continuous‐time multi‐agent systems with quantized communication

This paper focuses on the average consensus problem of first‐order and second‐order continuous‐time multi‐agent systems with logarithmic quantized information transmission. The balanced and strongly connected digraphs are utilized to characterize the interaction topologies between agents. Based on the state estimation, distributed state updating mechanisms are introduced for every agent such that all agents’ states achieve average consensus asymptotically. By means of differential inclusion theory, we discuss the existence and convergence property of the Krasovskii solutions to the closed‐loop system models. By designing the proper control gain parameters and quantizer accuracy, two sufficient conditions are established to guarantee the achievement of average consensus. Finally, two numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of theoretical results. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.