Title: Robust consensus of second-order multi-agent systems with input and time-varying communication delays

Authors: Meiying Ou; Haibo Du; Shihua Li

Addresses: School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China. ' School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China; School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, Anhui 230009, China. ' School of Automation, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China

Abstract: In this paper, the robust consensus problem of second-order multi-agent systems with constant input delays and time-varying communication delays is investigated. By using the neighbour-based rule, a novel non-linear consensus protocol is introduced to realise local control strategies for the second-order continuous-time multi-agent systems. Firstly, based on a model transformation, the multi-agent systems with input delays are transformed into delay-free ones. Secondly, based on Lyapunov-Krasovskii function, consensus conditions are obtained to guarantee that the position and velocity of all agents can achieve consensus asymptotically. In addition, the robust consensus of multi-agent systems with weight perturbations on communication network is also studied. It is shown that the consensus conditions are independent of input delays. Finally, the proposed non-linear consensus protocol is extended to solve the formation problem of multiple non-holonomic mobile robots. Simulation results are presented to validate the analysis.

Keywords: robust consensus; input delays; communication delays; formation control; multi-agent systems; MAS; time-varying delay; agent-based systems; modelling; model transformation; weight perturbations; networks; multiple robots; non-holonomic robots; mobile robots; simulation; robot control; multi-robot systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMIC.2012.051080

International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control, 2012 Vol.17 No.4, pp.285 - 294

Published online: 17 Dec 2014 *

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