Output Consensus Control of Multi-Agent Systems With Switching Networks and Incomplete Leader Measurement

Abstract

This article investigates an output consensus control problem for heterogeneous multi-agent systems with switching disconnected networks. As compared to similar works, each follower can measure only part information of the leader’s output in this paper, which lightens the measurement burden of simple agents when the dimension of leader’s output is large-scaled. In this case, due to the coexistence of incomplete measurements of leader’s output and disconnected networks, the outputs of some agents can deviate from the leader though there exists the observer-based control on them. In order to overcome this difficulty, we utilize the theory of switching unstable systems and propose a novel segmented time unit method. With the aid of this method, the switching intervals are segmented into some time units. Then by analyzing the cooperative control rule within the time units, the stabilizing characteristics of switching behaviors can be obtained to offset the divergence during the switching intervals. On this basis, a novel segmented time-varying Lyapunov function is developed to analyze the error states and sufficient criteria for the output consensus are derived. At last, a numerical simulation is shown to verify the theoretical results. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —Most existing works on switching disconnected networks require that the leader (or the exosystem) is critically stable (or stable). However, unstable high-dimensional leader widely exists in the fields of multi-agent systems, such as the formation control of MASs where the agents are affine functions of time. On this account, this paper studies multi-agent systems with unstable high-dimensional leader under switching disconnected networks. To solve this problem, a novel segmented time unit method is proposed in this paper to study multi-agent systems with switching disconnected networks and incomplete leader measurement. Based on the segmented time unit approach, the observer-based control protocols and switching signals are given to realize the overall consensus. Numerical simulations suggest that this approach is feasible but it has not been tested in production. Future works will consider the formation control problem with switching disconnected networks and incomplete leader measurement.