Set-valued protocols for almost consensus of multiagent systems with uncertain interagent communication

Abstract

One of the main challenges in robotics applications is dealing with inaccurate sensor data. Specifically, for a group of mobile robots the measurement of the exact location of the other robots relative to a particular robot is often inaccurate due to sensor uncertainty or detrimental environmental conditions. In this paper, we address the consensus problem for a group of agent robots with uncertain interagent communication. Measurement uncertainty is characterized by balls of radius r centered at the neighboring agents exact locations.We show that the agents reach an almost consensus state and converge to a time-varying ball of radius r and include an analysis approach to the problem based on set-valued analysis. Finally, several illustrative numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed set-valued consensus protocol framework.