Consensus of multi-agent systems with Lipschitz nonlinear dynamics and intermittent communications

Multiple dynamical agents may communicate with their neighbors only during some discontinuous time intervals in real environments. Motivated by this observation, distributed consensus problem is investigated in this paper for a class of multiagent systems with discontinuous communications, where each agent has intrinsic higher-order Lipschitz nonlinear dynamics. Under the assumption that the communication topology is strongly connected, a new class of distributed control algorithms based merely on the intermittent relative states of neighboring agents are constructed. By using tools from switched systems theory, it is shown that consensus in the closed-loop multi-agent systems can be achieved asymptotically if the general algebraic connectivity of the fixed topology is larger than a threshold value. The effectiveness of the analytical results is verified by numerical simulations. © 2012 Chinese Assoc of Automati.