Leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems with limited data rate

This paper investigates the leader-following consensus problem of time-invariant linear multi-agent systems with limited data rate. Based on the idea of assigning a priority level for each agent of the concerned multi-agent system, a novel distributed control law has been proposed. The proposed control law has two distinctive advantages. That is, it is fully distributed in the sense that it does not rely on the eigenvalues of the Laplace matrix associated with the topology. Moreover, the required data rate is independent of the number of agents and remains small even if the number of the agents in multi-agent systems is large. An example is finally given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.