Distributed quantised consensus in groups of agents with acceleration‐like inputs: a reference model‐based scheme

This study investigates the second‐order consensus problem in directed networks where the agents are governed by sampled‐data dynamics with acceleration‐like inputs. A distributed reference model‐based approach is adopted to avoid using the global information of eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix associated with the communication graph. First, the consensus via real‐valued communication is studied and it is shown that the consensus can be achieved under the adopted protocol with appropriate parameters. Next, the quantisation effects in system performances are discussed based on the obtained parameter conditions, it is proved that the quantised consensus can be achieved under the proposed protocols. Two numerical examples are provided to illustrate the theoretical results.