Sampled-Data Consensus Control of MAS with Packet Losses

In previous Chap. 2, the problem of time delay has been considered for the sampled-data control of MAS. It is formally proved that sampled-data control could have excellent tolerance and robustness to this typical network-induced issue. However, to only consider the problem of time delay is far from adequate, since as aforementioned in Chap. 1, the long-time delay may contribute to another type of network-induced issue, namely, the packet losses problem, in the sense that the information arrived after a long delayed time period is outdated and is not suitable for the current implementation of control, thus it should be discarded proactively in general, which implies that the packet losses problem arises. In addition, the packet disordering induced by time delay may also lead to packet losses. However, it should be noted that packet loss problem is essentially different from the pure time delay problem considered in Chap. 2, because with time delays, the transmitted information can always be received eventually despite outdated, while with packet losses, the transmitted information is missed regardless of proactively or reactively.