Output consensus of heterogeneous linear systems with quantized information

In this paper, we design two distributed output consensus controllers for heterogeneous linear systems based on internal model principle and then study the quantization effect on the controllers when uniform quantizers are used in the communication channels. The first controller considers the general situation when the internal model state matrix of the system may be unstable and the communication graphs are strongly connected directed graphs. We prove that the bound of the consensus error is proportional to the quantizer parameter with a coefficient related to the size of the network and the property of the communication graphs. The second controller considers the situation when the internal model state matrix is neutrally stable and the communication graphs are undirected connected graphs. In this case, we derive a better bound of the consensus error which is proportional to the quantizer parameter and the coefficient is unrelated to the size of the network when the linear systems are homogeneous. Simulation examples are provided to illustrate the theoretical results. (C) 2013 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.