Fast consensus seeking for multi-agent systems

For multi-agent systems based on the local information, the agents automatically converge to a common consensus state and the convergence speed is determined by the algebraic connectivity of the communication network. To study fast consensus seeking problems of multi-agent systems in undirected networks, a consensus protocol is proposed which considers the average information of the agents' states in a certain time interval, and a consensus convergence criterion for the system is obtained. Based on the frequency-domain analysis and algebra graph theory, it is shown that if the time interval is chosen properly, then requiring the same maximum control effort the proposed protocol reaches consensus faster than the standard consensus protocol. Simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of these theoretical results.