Consensus of second-order multi-agent systems with delayed nonlinear dynamics and intermittent communications

Abstract This article investigates the second-order consensus problem of multi-agent systems with inherent delayed nonlinear dynamics and intermittent communications. Each agent is assumed to obtain the measurements of relative states between its own and the neighbours' only at a sequence of disconnected time intervals. A new kind of protocol based only on the intermittent measurements of neighbouring agents is proposed to guarantee the states of agents to reach second-order consensus under a fixed strongly connected and balanced topology. By constructing a common Lyapunov function, it is shown that consensus can be reached if the general algebraic connectivity and communication time duration are larger than their corresponding threshold values, respectively. Finally, simulation examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the theoretical analysis. Keywords: multi-agent systemconsensusintermittent communicationdelayed nonlinear dynamicsdirected graph Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council under the GRF Grant CityU 1114/11E, and by the National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grants 60974078 and 61104145, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China under Grant No. BK2011581, the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China under Grant No. 20110092120024, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China and the Information Processing and Automation Technology Prior Discipline of Zhejiang Province-Open Research Foundation under Grants 20120801 and 20120802.