A brief survey of recent advances in consensus of sampled-data multi-agent systems

Consensus problems of multi-agent systems have attracted an ever-increasing interest in the control community due to their great potential in various applications such as cooperative unmanned air vehicles, automated highway systems scheduling, air traffic control, sensor networks. This paper presents a brief overview of theoretical development of consensus in a sampled-data setting, paying special attention to those published since 2011. Recent results in this area are categorized into several directions, such as consensus based on periodic sampling, variable sampling, stochastic sampling, and event-triggered communication. In particular, for event-triggered consensus, some typical patterns of event-triggering conditions are reviewed based on different definitions of a transmission error and a threshold.