Event-driven multi-consensus of multi-agent networks with repulsive links

This paper studies multiple coordination of multi-agent networks under an event-driven paradigm. For an undirected connected graph, a node clustering scheme is first adopted to ensure a relatively strong degree of connectivity within each potential subgroup, and some repulsive effect is used to deal with the extra-subgroup links. To reduce unnecessary communication, a distributed event-driven controller is designed via coupled intra-subgroup and extra-subgroup information. Based on the LaSalle's invariance principle, it is shown that under the proposed event-driven control configuration, multi-agent networks can realize multi-consensus without any balanced requirement on the underlying topologies. Simulation work is presented to validate the theoretical results. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.