Multi-Agent Consensus With Relative-State-Dependent Measurement Noises

In this note, the distributed consensus corrupted by relative-state-dependent measurement noises is considered. Each agent can measure or receive its neighbors´ state information with random noises, whose intensity is a vector function of agents´ relative states. By investigating the structure of this interaction and the tools of stochastic differential equations, we develop several small consensus gain theorems to give sufficient conditions in terms of the control gain, the number of agents and the noise intensity function to ensure mean square (m.s.) and almost sure (a.s.) consensus and quantify the convergence rate and the steady-state error. Especially, for the case with homogeneous communication and control channels, a necessary and sufficient condition to ensure m.s. consensus on the control gain is given and it is shown that the control gain is independent of the specific network topology, but only depends on the number of nodes and the noise coefficient constant. For symmetric measurement models, the almost sure convergence rate is estimated by the Iterated Logarithm Law of Brownian motions.