An Emulation Approach to Sampled-Data Synchronization

This work presents a novel approach for achieving state synchronization of homogeneous LTI agents to a trajectory generated by a prescribed reference generator under intermittent and asynchronous communication. The proposed protocol involves emulating 'ideal' global analog dynamics at each agent to generate the control signal between samples. Each agent transmits the centroid state of its local emulator rather than its own state vector, which is used to update the emulators at the receiving end. The paper guarantees synchronization with a prescribed reference generator under mild assumptions on the system's structure, persistency of connectivity, and uniform boundedness of sampling intervals. Additionally, the controller parameters are independent of the sampling interval, allowing it to be designed without any a priori knowledge of the sampling sequence. Lastly, a simplified and scalable implementation whose dimension is independent of the number of agents is also proposed.