Collisions-Free Consensus Tracking Control of Multi-Agent Systems under Unreliable Communication Topologies

This paper investigates the problem of collisions-free consensus tracking of multi-agent systems. Differing from the existing results where the collision avoidance methods are developed based on reliable communications, the communications between agents are considered to be intermittently interrupted (e.g., due to failures, adversarial attacks, or other agents' blockages), which will destroy the interagent coordination and thus cause potential collision threats. To address it, a switching barrier-Lyapunov redesign method is proposed and an adaptive barrier function-based feedback gain is introduced into the controller to enhance the coordination and prevent collisions. Under mild assumptions, it is shown that the constructed controller can simultaneously guarantee the tracking performance and collision avoidance between agents. Simulations are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.