On leader-following consensus under communication failure

It is well-known that the communication among agents plays an important role in leader-following consensus. When the communication fails, it will greatly degrade the performance of the leader-following consensus. As technology develops, memory components are quite cheap. Thus it is very natural to use the information before the communication failure to enhance the robustness of leader-following consensus. This paper proposes an effective communication protocol re-design method to handle the communication failure. The re-design method uses a structure similar to “zero-order hold” to remember the input before the communication failure. Thus the leader-following consensus with communication failure can be treated as a time-varying delay system. Less conservative sufficient conditions to ensure the closed loop stability are provided in terms of the restriction of frequency and length rate of communication failures. Simulation results including the diving consensus of the unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) demonstrate the effectiveness of the obtained results.