Sampled-Data Consensus Control of MAS with Time Delay

As mentioned in Chap. 1, sampled-data based control is one of the useful and effective strategies to avoid continuous communication. The implementation of sampling mechanisms can be divided into synchronous sampling and asynchronous sampling. The former one requires that all the agents in a MAS share global and synchronous clock, and have the same sampling period [1–4], while the latter is not needed. In general, the asynchronous sampling is less restrictive compared with synchronous sampling in practical applications, but still has not been sufficiently studied especially when there exist time-varying communication delays. Notice that communication delays are usually inevitable during information exchanges among agents via shared network and it is well known that time delays may degrade system control performance or even result in instability.