Consensus with reduced communication links via relative neighboring velocity information

In this paper, a consensus protocol is introduced to virtually manipulate the communication topology of a given networked multiagent system - without adding physical edges to the graph. The proposed protocol achieves this objective by utilizing not only neighboring agents' relative position information but also their possibly delayed velocity information. It is shown that the stability of the proposed framework is not dependent on the possible time delay present in the neighboring velocity information. In addition, it is formally proven that utilization of the proposed consensus protocol is equivalent to the addition of virtual communication links in a standard consensus protocol. Therefore, the proposed framework provides a tool to increase the performance of a multiagent system without resorting to adding communication links.