Decentralized Global Connectivity Maintenance for Multi-agent Systems using Prescribed Performance Average Consensus Protocols

Connectivity maintenance control constitutes an issue of crucial importance for networked multi-agent systems with limited communication range. Towards this direction, we propose a decentralized algorithm to estimate the global connectivity of the communication graph of a multi-agent system, which subsequently feeds a gradient-based controller that guarantees global connectivity maintenance. The proposed controller is suitable for applications including secondary tasks as it is only triggered when it is necessary to prevent loss of connectivity. Finally, we verify the superiority of our algorithm against a well-established related method and validate the efficacy of the control scheme through simulated paradigms.