Average consensus in multi-agent systems with time-varying delays and packet losses

This paper investigates the average consensus with time-varying delays and data losses for multi-agent systems. The problem is formulated under the sampled-data framework by discretizing the first-order agent dynamics with a zero-order hold. The communication graph is undirected. The delays are uniform, time-varying and bounded. The loss of data across each communication link occurs at certain probability and it is governed by a Bernoulli process. The consensus problem is first converted into its corresponding error dynamics. Then the stochastic stability is studied for the error dynamic system, by explicitly incorporating the probability of packet dropouts. A numerical example is shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.