ABSTRACT
The past decade has seen a surge of research interest in multi-agent systems (MASs) due primarily to their extensive applications in a variety of areas ranging from the chemistry manufacturing industry, geological exploration, and building automation, to military and aerospace industries. MASs consist of a large number of interaction/cooperation units called agents which directly interact with their neighbors according to a given topology. The MASs often display rich yet complex behavior even when all the agents have tractable models and interact with their neighbors in a simple and predictable fashion. Because of its clear physical and engineering insights, the consensus problem of MASs has been garnering considerable research attention and many results have been reported in the literature such as those on cooperative control of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), formation control for multi-robot systems, collective behaviors of flocks or swarms and distributed sensor networks.
