Consensus in multi-agent systems with communication constraints

The problem of second-order consensus is investigated in this paper for a class of multi-agent systems with a fixed directed topology and communication constraints where each agent is assumed to share information only with its neighbors on some disconnected time intervals. A novel consensus protocol designed based on synchronous intermittent local information feedback is proposed to coordinate the states of agents to converge to second-order consensus under a fixed strongly connected topology, which is then extended to the case where the communication topology contains a directed spanning tree. By using tools from algebraic graph theory and Lyapunov control approach, it is proved that second-order consensus can be reached if the general algebraic connectivity of the communication topology is larger than a threshold value and the mobile agents communicate with their neighbors frequently enough as the network evolves. Finally, a numerical example is simulated to verify the theoretical analysis. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.