Coordinated control of second-order multi-agent systems with quantized-observer

In this paper, we consider distributed coordination of discrete-time second-order multi-agent systems with limited communication data-rate. The position of each agent is measurable, while the velocity is not. A quantized-observer based encoding-decoding scheme is proposed, which integrates the state observation with channel coding/decoding. A distributed coordinated control law is proposed based on the states and outputs of the encoders and decoders. By converting the closed-loop nonlinear system into a linear system with disturbance, sufficient conditions on the control gains and network topology for the existence of finite-level quantizers to ensure the closed-loop convergence are given, and it is shown that these conditions are also necessary in some sense. It is proved that, by selecting the number of quantization levels (data-rate) properly, the asymptotic synchronization of the positions and velocities can be achieved.