Leader-following consensus of second-order non-linear multi-agent systems with directed intermittent communication

Abstract

This study addresses leader-following consensus problems for multi-agent systems with second-order non-linear dynamics, under the assumption that each agent can only communicate with its neighbouring agents intermittently and the communication topology does not keep strongly connected or contain a spanning tree all along. Firstly, a class of distributed consensus algorithms are designed only based on the relative local intermittent information. Notions of completely and partly intermittent communication are proposed. Some sufficient conditions are derived for achieving consensus tracking under a general fixed topology with completely and partly intermittent communication. Then, as an extension, leader-following consensus tracking is studied under time-varying intermittent communication topologies. Finally, the effectiveness of the main results is illustrated by numerical simulations. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2014.