Relaxed conditions for consensus in multi-agent coordination

This paper proposes relaxed suffient conditions for the consensus of multi-agent systems by the averaging protocols with time-varying system topology. Bidirectional information exchange between neighboring agents is considered and both the discrete-time and continuous-time consensus protocols are studied. It is shown that the consensus is reached if there exists an unbounded time sequence such that two agents who own the maximum and minimum states at each time instant in the sequence will be jointly connected at some future time. Further, this result is applied to the original nonlinear Vicsek model, and a sufficient condition for the heading consensus of the group with restricted initial conditions is obtained.