Cloud-Mediated Self-Triggered Synchronization of Physically Coupled Linear Agents

This letter deals with a cloud-mediated self-triggered synchronization of physically coupled linear agents. In such a multi-agent system, each agent has not only information communication but also physical couplings with its neighboring agents. In the cloud-mediated control, each agent asynchronously communicates with its neighbors through a cloud repository. At every access time, each agent estimates current and future behaviors of its neighbors as well as of itself, and locally determines its next access time to the cloud according to a certain access rule. A major difficulty in the cloud-mediated control of physically coupled agents is that each agent cannot accurately estimate its neighbors’ behaviors because they are continuously influenced by other agents through the physical couplings. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a novel self-triggered synchronizing control law for the physically coupled linear agents. The proposed control law achieves bounded synchronization by appropriately bounding the adverse effects of the physical couplings.