Group consensus in multi-agent systems with sampled data

This paper investigates a group consensus problem of multi-agent systems with sampled data. A distributed linear consensus protocol is first designed to solve the group consensus problem, and then the dynamics of all the agents are presented with a linear estimation-based sampling period. By analyzing convergence properties of the dynamics, some necessary and sufficient conditions based on the sampling period are established for the agents reaching the group consensus. Finally, a simulation result is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.