Quasi-exact dynamic average consensus under asynchronous communication and symmetric delays

This work focuses on the problem of dynamic average consensus, which involves computing the average of a set of time-varying reference signals spread across a network in a distributed fashion. To make this problem more applicable to realistic scenarios, we consider agents in the network that can only communicate at asynchronous discrete-time instants and are subject to time-varying symmetric edge-wise delays. Our proposal is based on high-order sliding modes. It is quasi-exact in the sense that exact convergence to the average signal is obtained when continuous-time communication is available, even if the dynamic average is persistently varying. Additionally, under asynchronous discrete-time communication, our proposal exhibits reduced chattering and improved robustness compared to other approaches. We provide a formal analysis of the algorithm's convergence and present several numerical experiments to verify the advantages of our proposal.