Multi-agent consensus under communication-broadcast mixed environment

This paper addresses multi-agent control under an environment where both agent-to-agent communication and one-to-all broadcast are available. The problem studied here is a consensus problem with limited communication range and unlimited broadcast range. For solving this, we first introduce a concept of the connected agent group. Using this notion, the problem is reduced into a consensus problem for the group-to-group relation and that for the agent-to-agent relation in the groups, from which we derive a controller achieving the consensus with probability 1. The performance of the proposed controller is demonstrated by numerical simulation.