Quantized leaderless and leader-following consensus of high-order multi-agent systems with limited data rate

In this paper, the leaderless and leader-following consensus problems are considered for a class of discrete-time multi-agent systems with limited communication data rate. Under a connected undirected communication network, a quantized observer-based encoding-decoding scheme is designed and a distributed control law based on the outputs of the encoders and decoders is proposed. With the help of the perturbation analysis of matrices and quantization technique, it is shown that n bits of information exchange between agents are enough to guarantee the quantized leaderless and leader-following consensus with an exponential convergence rate, when each agent is in the form of the n-th order integrator and observable with one measurable state.