Second-order consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems with restricted switching topology and time delay

In this paper, a distributed protocol based on only relative position information is proposed for consensus of second-order multi-agent systems with inherent nonlinear dynamics and communication time delay. Compared with previous works, the distinguished feature of the paper lies in the directed interaction topology that is switching according to average dwell time (ADT) switching signals. Under the proposed protocol, we not only present sufficient conditions for ensuring consensus, but also explicitly give the lower bound of ADT for admissible switching signals. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed consensus algorithm.