Consensus and Flocking under Communication Failure

TL;DR

This paper proves that consensus and flocking can still be achieved in multi-agent systems despite communication failures, under certain excitation and scrambling conditions, without additional assumptions.

Contribution

It establishes that consensus and flocking are attainable in first- and second-order systems under communication failure conditions without extra hypotheses.

Findings

Consensus achieved in first-order systems with communication failure.

Flocking achieved in second-order systems under nonintegrability condition.

Communication failures do not prevent convergence under specified conditions.

Abstract

For networked systems, Persistent Excitation and Integral Scrambling Condition are conditions ensuring that communication failures between agents can occur, but a minimal level of service is ensured. We consider cooperative multi-agent systems satisfying either of such conditions. For first-order systems, we prove that consensus is attained. For second-order systems, flocking is attained under a standard condition of nonintegrability of the interaction function. In both cases and under both conditions, the original goal is reached under no additional hypotheses on the system with respect to the case of no communication failures.