Periodic event-triggered average consensus over directed graphs

This paper considers a multi-agent consensus problem over strongly connected and balanced directed graphs. Unlike many works that consider continuous or periodic communication and control strategies, we are interested in developing an event-triggered algorithm to reduce the overall load of the network in terms of limited communication and control updates. Furthermore, we focus on a sampled-data implementation that allows agents in a communication network to determine whether locally sampled information should be discarded or broadcasted to neighbors. This formulation allows us to automatically rule out Zeno behavior that is often a challenge in distributed event-triggered systems. We show that all agents eventually rendezvous at the centroid of their initial formation given an appropriate selection of the local sampling period and event-triggering parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed communication and control law through simulations.