Time-extended consensus for multi-agent non-interactive collaboration

Plan-based coordination, which can fill the vacancy of control during the communication silent periods, improves the ability of agents’ independence and reduces the requirement of communication resources. This paper presents a generalized form of plan-based coordination, namely the time-extended consensus problem, which is applicable to multi-agent systems entering non-interaction state. Conditions for achieving time-extended consensus are described for systems subject to the Lipschitz condition. A control protocol for time-extended consensus is constructed using linear superposition of drag vector fields. The convergence process of time-extended states based on the proposed control protocol is investigated in terms of the speed of approaching consensus. Simulation results demonstrate the advantages and limitations of the proposed method for time-extended consensus and how it compares to conventional multi-agent state synchronization.