Research On Cooperative Consensus Of Multi-agent Systems Under Variable Communication Topology

The tremendous improvement and rapid development of computer network technology,distributed control technology,power electronics and sensor communication technology have greatly promoted the maturity and improvement of complex system theory.As an important part of complex system,the distributed cooperative control of multi-agent systems(MASs)has received great attention.Relevant research results have been widely applied to many fields,such as formation control,distributed decision making in sensor networks,as well as aggregation and clustering behavior in biological systems.Consensus is a typical dynamic behavior of MASs.It requires that the specific state quantities of each agent in a MAS are continuously updated and evolved according to the state of its neighbors,and finally achieve cooperative consensus.In order to achieve consensus,it is necessary for agents to exchange local information between each other.But agents are actually in various complicated environments,the communication links among agents may be intermittent and the network topology may also be switched due to the external interference.It will lead serious influence on the information transfer and sharing locally in MASs,and ultimately destroy the realization of cooperative consensus.Based on the above problems,this paper aims to study the cooperative consensus of MASs under switched communication topology.The existing literatures often require that the switched disconnected subgraphs satisfy the joint connectivity condition or the switched connected subgraphs satisfy the periodic switching condition in the variable network topology.However,the key problem lies in how to further quantify the switching dwell time,especially when the disconnected subgraphs appear more frequently than the connected ones.To this end,this paper specifically studies the tracking consensus of a class of double integral MASs under certain switching signals.By using the multiple Lyapunov function theory and average dwell time method,with the assumption that the communication network can randomly switch between connected and disconnected subgraphs,a distributed control protocol based on neighbor information is designed.Under the designed control protocol,all follower agents can track the leader at a certain exponential convergence speed in low bandwidth communication network environments.The results show that when the ratio of the total running time of theconnected subgraphs to the disconnected ones is not greater than some specific upper bound,some small average dwell time can guarantee the stability of the controlled switched network system.The main contributions of this paper consist of the following three aspects.Firstly,compared with the traditional periodically connected condition and average dwell time methods for switching connected subgraphs,the current switching control protocol allows more disconnected subgraphs to participate in the switching control,which will greatly reduce the communication pressure of the manual system with large-scale agents.Secondly,the current result is a quantification of the traditional jointly connected conditions,which shows that a small average dwell time can be selected to guarantee the stability of the whole multi-agent systems as the total running time ratio of the connected subgraphs to the disconnected ones is less than a certain upper bound.Finally,different from the recent topology-dependent average dwell time approaches,the current dwell time is not only consistent for both the connected and disconnected switching subgraphs but also selected.Therefore,the results can be implemented more convenient and effective in practice.