Variable impulsive consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems

In this paper, the consensus problem for nonlinear multi-agent systems with variable impulsive control method is studied. In order to decrease the communication wastage, a novel distributed impulsive protocol is designed to achieve consensus. Compared with the common impulsive consensus method with fixed impulsive instants, the variable impulsive consensus method proposed in this paper is more flexible and reliable in practical application. Based on Lyapunov stability theory and some inequality techniques, several novel impulsive consensus conditions are obtained to realize the consensus of multi-agent systems. Finally, some necessary simulations are performed to validate the effectiveness of theoretical results.     

Leader-following exponential consensus of general linear multi-agent systems via event-triggered control with combinational measurements

In this paper, the leader-following exponential consensus problem of general linear multi-agent systems via event-triggered control is considered. By using the combinational measurements, two classes of event triggers are designed, one depends on continuous communications between the agents, the other avoids continuous communications. For such two classes of event triggers, the exponential consensus as well as the convergence rates of the controlled multi-agent systems are studied, respectively, by employing the M-matrix theory, algebraic graph theory and the Lyapunov method.     

Impulsive consensus problem of second-order multi-agent systems with switching topologies

The paper proposes an impulsive consensus protocol to solve the consensus problem of the second-order multi-agent systems with fixed and switching topologies. Some sufficient conditions are obtained for the states of follower agents converging to the state of leader asymptotically. Two numerical simulations are also given to verify the effectiveness of the theoretical analysis.     

Hybrid consensus for multi-agent systems with time-driven jumps

In this paper, the behavior of scalar multi-agent systems over networks subject to time-driven jumps. Assuming that all agents communicate through distinct communication digraphs at jump and flow times, the asymptotic multi-consensus behavior of the hybrid network is explicitly characterized. The hybrid multi-consensus is shown to be associated with a suitable partition that is almost equitable for both the jump and flow communication digraphs. In doing so, no assumption on the underlying digraphs is introduced. Finally, the coupling rules making the multi-consensus subspace attractive are established. Several simulation examples illustrate the theoretical results.     

Second-order cluster consensus of multi-agent dynamical systems with impulsive effects

This paper discuss the cluster consensus of multi-agent dynamical systems (MADSs) with impulsive effects and coupling delays. Some sufficient conditions that guarantee cluster consensus in MADS are derived. In each cluster, agents update their position and velocity states according to a leader’s instantaneous information, and interactions among agents are uncertain. Furthermore, switching topology problem in MADS is considered by impulsive stability and adaptive strategy. Finally, numerical simulations are given to verify our theoretical analysis.     

Hybrid event-triggered and impulsive control for time-delay systems

In this paper, we study the problem of hybrid event-triggered control for a class of nonlinear time-delay systems. Using a Razumikhin-type input-to-state stability result for time-delay systems, we design an event-triggered control algorithm to stabilize the given time-delay system. In order to exclude Zeno behavior, we combine the impulsive control mechanism with our event-triggered strategy. In this sense, the proposed algorithm is a hybrid impulsive and event-triggered strategy. Sufficient conditions for the stabilization of the nonlinear systems with time delay are obtained by using Lyapunov method and Razumikhin technique. Numerical simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of our theoretical results.     

Event-triggered impulsive control of lower-triangular large-scale nonlinear systems based on gain scaling technique

This paper investigates the event-triggered impulsive control problem for a class of large-scale nonlinear systems in lower-triangular form. Based on gain scaling technique and impulsive control theory, a novel decentralized event-triggered impulsive control strategy is first put forward by introducing a static scaling gain, where no control input exists between two consecutive triggering points. Moreover, when the large uncertainties exist in system nonlinearities, we further develop a new control strategy by introducing a time-varying scaling gain. It is proved that the proposed closed-loop control strategies exclude the Zeno behavior without sacrificing the global convergence of system states. Compared with the existing results, it is the first time to apply impulsive control to lower-triangular large-scale nonlinear systems, and the advantages of event-triggered impulsive control and gain scaling technique are subtly combined in the proposed control strategies. Finally, two simulation examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.     

Distributed adaptive switching consensus control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems with switched leader dynamics

In this paper, the leader-following distributed consensus control problem is addressed for general linear multi-agent systems with heterogeneous uncertain agent dynamics and switched leader dynamics. Different from most existing results with a single linear time-invariant (LTI) leader dynamics, the leader dynamics under consideration is composed by a family of LTI models and a switching logic governing the switches among them, which is capable of generating more diverse and sophisticated reference signals to accommodate more complicated consensus control design tasks. A novel distributed adaptive switching consensus protocol is developed by incorporating the model reference adaptive control mechanism and arbitrary switching control technique, which can be synthesized by following a two-layer hierarchical design scheme. A numerical example has been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Impulsive consensus of one-sided Lipschitz nonlinear multi-agent systems with Semi-Markov switching topologies

Many real systems involve not only parameter changes but also sudden variations in environmental conditions, which often causes unpredictable topologies switching. This paper investigates the impulsive consensus problem of the one-sided Lipschitz nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) with Semi-Markov switching topologies. Different from the existing modeling methods of the Markov chain, the Semi-Markov chain is adopted to describe this kind of randomly occurring changes reasonably. To cope with the communication and control cost constraints in the multi-agent systems, the distributed impulsive control method is applied to address the leader–follower consensus problem. Beyond that, to obtain a wider nonlinear application range, the one-sided condition is delicately developed to the controller design, and the results are different from the ones obtained in the traditional method with the Lipschitz condition (note that the existing results are usually only applicable to the case with small Lipschitz constant). Based on the characteristics of cumulative distribution functions, the theory of Lyapunov-like function and impulsive differential equation, the asymptotically mean square consensus of multi-agent systems is maintained with the proposed impulsive control protocol. Finally, an explanatory simulation is presented to validate the correctness of the proposed approach conclusively.     

Impulsive consensus in directed networks of identical nonlinear oscillators with switching topologies

In this paper, we investigate the problem of impulsive consensus of multi-agent systems, where each agent can be modeled as an identical nonlinear oscillator. Firstly, an impulsive control protocol is designed for directed networks with switching topologies based on the local information of agents. Then sufficient conditions are given to guarantee the consensus of the networked nonlinear oscillators. How to select the discrete instants and impulsive constants is also discussed. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of our theoretical results.     

Event-triggered delayed impulsive control for input-to-state stability of nonlinear impulsive systems

This paper studies the input-to-state stability (ISS) and integral input-to-state stability (iISS) of nonlinear impulsive systems in the framework of event-triggered impulsive control (ETIC), where the stabilizing effect of time delays in impulses is fully considered. Some sufficient conditions which can avoid Zeno behavior and guarantee the ISS/iISS property of impulsive systems are proposed, where external inputs are considered in both the continuous dynamics and impulsive dynamics. A novel event-triggered delayed impulsive control (ETDIC) strategy which establishes a relationship among event-triggered parameters, impulse strength and time delays in impulses is presented. It is shown that time delays in impulses can contribute to the stabilization of impulsive systems in ISS/iISS sense. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results is illustrated by two numerical examples.     

Stabilization of switched linear systems using an improved event-triggered control scheme

This paper is concerned with the event-triggered control of switched linear systems. The coupling of system switching and event-triggered communication raises two phenomena: (1) the update of controller cannot always catch up with the active subsystem; (2) the switching may lead to additional triggers. The first phenomenon is called the asynchronous switching induced by network communication and the second one brings great difficulty to avoid the Zeno behavior of event-triggered mechanism (ETM). To address the above problem, we propose a new ETM which contains the switching signal of models and controllers and the discontinuity of triggering error at switching time instants. A relative threshold strategy, combined with a jump function, is designed as a new threshold function. By introducing a compensation term, the linear feedback control law is extended to avoid the Zeno behavior of ETM and improve the solvability of control algorithm. Based on the proposed event-triggered control scheme, the exponential stabilization of switched systems is achieved with relaxed constraints on the triggering and switching conditions. The obtained results are validated by a numerical example.     

Formation control for second-order multi-agent systems with time-varying delays under directed topology

In this paper, we investigate a formation control problem for second-order multi-agent systems with directed graph interconnection topologies that contain time-varying coupling delays. By using a special multiple leaders’ framework, sufficient conditions are obtained for both time-invariant and time-varying formations as well as for time-varying formations for trajectory tracking, which guarantees the attainment of the formations is at exponentially converging speeds. Some numerical simulations are also conducted to validate the theoretical results.     

Dynamic periodic event-triggered gain-scheduling control co-design for quasi-LPV systems

This paper investigates dynamic periodic event-triggered gain-scheduling control co-design for nonlinear systems subject to disturbances. The considered class of nonlinear systems is such that an equivalent polytopic quasi-LPV model is obtained. Based on the co-design approach, gain-scheduled control law and dynamic event-triggering mechanism (ETM) are jointly designed. The proposed co-design condition is formulated in terms of linear matrix inequality (LMI) conditions which are derived from the Bessel–Legendre inequality and the delay-dependent reciprocally convex combination lemma. As the state information is available to the gain-scheduled controller at specific instants determined by the ETM, it induces the asynchronous phenomenon between the parameters of the controller and the plant’s quasi-LPV model. To reduce the conservativeness induced by this asynchronous phenomenon, an LMI relaxation is proposed. Numerical examples illustrate the advantages of the proposed dynamic periodic event-triggered control co-design approach over its static counterpart.     

Randomly changing leader-following consensus control for Markovian switching multi-agent systems with interval time-varying delays

This paper considers the problem of leader-following consensus stability and also stabilization for multi-agent systems with interval time-varying delays. The randomly occurring interconnection information of the leader and the Markovian switching interconnection information of the agent are matters of concern in the systems. Through construction of a suitable Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional and utilization of the reciprocally convex approach, new delay-dependent consensus stability and stabilization conditions for the systems are established in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) which can be easily solved by using various effective optimization algorithms. Two numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.     

Sampled-data-based consensus of multi-agent systems under asynchronous denial-of-service attacks

This paper investigates the sampled-data-based consensus problem of multi-agent systems (MASs) under asynchronous denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. In order to describe asynchronous DoS attacks, a new definition of complete DoS attack and novel double-layer switched systems are proposed. A complete DoS attack refers to a DoS attack that consists of several consecutive successful DoS attacks. While a successful DoS attack denotes an attack that can break the connected communication topology into several isolated subgraphs. Based on this, the original system is transformed into a double-layer switched systems with a stable mode and several unstable modes. It should be pointed out that each unstable subsystem is also composed of finite second-level unstable subsystems that represent consecutive successful DoS attacks. Moreover, a new double-mode-dependent Lyapunov function (DMDLF) method is employed to obtain the lower and upper bounds of the corresponding average dwell time (ADT) of subsystems. It is proved that the consensus of MASs under asynchronous DoS attacks can be achieved by using the feedback consensus controllers which can be designed simultaneously. Finally, an illustrative example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the results proposed in this paper.     

Resource limited event-triggered model predictive control for continuous-time nonlinear systems based on first-order hold

This paper investigates a resources-limited situation in the event-triggered model predictive control (ETMPC) for continuous-time nonlinear system with first-order hold fashion. In consideration of limited bandwidth in data transmission through wireless network under actual operation, our strategy divides the prediction horizon, and applies linear interpolation instead of zero-order hold fashion to obtain a better system performance, so that the reduction of resources and the optimization of strategy can be guaranteed. Furthermore, in actual industry processes, quadratic cost function cannot be implemented in all operations, then general cost function is adopted in this paper. Based on the first-order hold method and general cost function, the feasibility of the ETMPC algorithm and the stability of dynamical systems are analyzed. At last, a practical example is given to show the advantages of our method.     

Impulsive control for one-side Lipschitz nonlinear MASs under semi-Markovian switching topologies with partially unknown transition probabilities

This article addresses the consensus problem of impulsive control for the multi-agent systems under uncertain semi-Markovian switching topologies. Considering the control and information exchanging cost in the implementation of multi-agent systems, an impulsive control protocol is developed not only to relieve the network burden but address the consensus problem. In addition, globally Lipschitz condition, as required in many existing literatures, is not needed in this article, so we introduce one-side Lipschitz condition to loosen the constraint of Lipschitz constant and widen the range of nonlinear application. According to cumulative distribution functions and Lyapunov functional, sufficient criteria are derived for the mean square consensus of multi-agent systems. It is shown that the impulsive sequence is not only inconsistent with switching sequence but also mode-dependent. Finally, simulation results are given to validate the superiority of the theoretical results.     

Target problems under state constraints for nonlinear controlled impulsive systems

We study the problem of reaching a target without leaving a prescribed constraint set for a dynamical system described by a controlled differential equation and a controlled instantaneous reset function. We characterize all initial conditions from which the objective can be reached. Then we characterize the value function associated with the optimal reaching time problem.