Asynchronous periodic event-triggered coordination of multi-agent systems

This paper proposes an asynchronous periodic event-triggered communication and control law to solve the multi-agent consensus problem. In contrast with similar works on periodic event-triggered coordination, we do not assume a common sampling period among the agents. Since agents can only take actions (e.g., broadcast a message, update a control signal) at their own sampling times, agents in general do not have the luxury of being able to immediately react to new information received by neighbors as is often assumed in similar works. This type of model is much more pragmatic as it better accounts for different pieces of hardware/software operating at different frequencies. We provide sufficient conditions under which the proposed algorithm guarantees that the agents converge to a consensus state. Numerical experiments illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.