Distributed Consensus Control of Multi-agent Systems with Higher Order Agent Dynamics and Dynamically Changing Directed Interaction Topologies

In 2005, Ren and Beard, under the network connectivity assumption that the union of the directed interaction graphs contains a spanning tree frequently enough, proposed a control protocol to solve the distributed consensus control problem for a multi-agent system with first order integrator agent dynamics. The consensus control protocol for second order systems proposed by the same authors, Ren and Beard, requires that the switching directed interaction graph has a spanning tree at every time instant to guarantee consensus. In this paper, we propose a distributed consensus control protocol which extends the first order system results of Ren and Beard to agents represented by a general higher order controllable linear system, under the same network connectivity assumption that the union of the directed interaction graphs contains a spanning tree frequently enough. We show that the consensus can be achieved asymptotically by the group of agents under our proposed distributed control protocol. Simulation study illustrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.