Consensus tracking for higher-order multi-agent systems with switching directed topologies and occasionally missing control inputs

This paper studies the distributed consensus tracking problem of linear higher-order multi-agent systems with switching directed topologies and occasionally missing control inputs. In this framework, the underlying topology of dynamic agents may switch among several directed graphs, each having a directed spanning tree rooted at the leader. Furthermore, the control inputs to the followers may be temporally missed due to actuator failures and network-induced packet loss. To guarantee asymptotic consensus tracking in such a multi-agent system, several distributed controllers are constructed based only on the relative state information of neighboring agents. By appropriately constructing a switching Lyapunov function and using tools from the M-matrix theory, some sufficient conditions for achieving distributed consensus tracking are provided. Finally, some numerical simulations are given to illustrate the theoretical analysis. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.