A survey on recent advances in distributed sampled-data cooperative control of multi-agent systems

Distributed cooperative control of multi-agent systems has been one of the most active research topics in the fields of automatic control and robotics. This paper provides a survey on recent advances in distributed cooperative control under a sampled-data setting, with special emphasis on the published results since 2011. First, some typical sampling mechanisms related to this topic, such as uniform sampling, nonuniform sampling, random sampling, and event-triggered sampling, are summarized in both asynchronous and synchronous paradigms. Then, based on different coordinated tasks, recent results on distributed sampled-data cooperative control of multi-agent systems are categorized into four classes, i.e., sampled-data leaderless consensus, sampled-data leader-following consensus, sampled-data containment control, and sampled-data formation control. For each class, some explicit research lines are identified according to various sampling mechanisms. In particular, depending on definitions of event triggering conditions, some representative event-triggered sampling mechanisms are sorted out and discussed in detail. Finally, several challenging issues for future research are proposed.