Connectivity-maintaining Consensus of Multi-agent Systems With Communication Management Based on Predictive Control Strategy

This paper studies the connectivity-maintaining consensus of multi-agent systems. Considering the impact of the sensing ranges of agents for connectivity and communication energy consumption, a novel communication management strategy is proposed for multi-agent systems so that the connectivity of the system can be maintained and the communication energy can be saved. In this paper, communication management means a strategy about how the sensing ranges of agents are adjusted in the process of reaching consensus. The proposed communication management in this paper is not coupled with controller but only imposes a constraint for controller, so there is more freedom to develop an appropriate control strategy for achieving consensus. For the multi-agent systems with this novel communication management, a predictive control based strategy is developed for achieving consensus. Simulation results indicate the effectiveness and advantages of our scheme.