An analysis on containment control for discrete-time second-order multi-agent systems with asynchronous intermittent communication

Abstract

In this paper, a containment control issue for discrete-time second-order multi-agents (MASs) with asynchronous intermittent communication is analyzed, where each agent communicates with some of its neighbors at certain discrete time according to its own clock rather than the complete discrete process and all agents’ clocks are independent of each other. By constructing the spanning subgraph of communication topology at each discrete time, the stability analysis of containment control under the asynchronous intermittent communication is equivalently transformed into the products convergence of nonnegative matrices. Hybrid tools including matrix theory and the composite binary relation are utilized to analyze this convergence issue. Unlike the existing results on the containment control with fixed topology, in which the followers will gradually enter into the convex hull constructed by the leaders and their final positions are fixed, it is theoretically proved in this paper that although the followers will enter into the convex hull of the leaders under the asynchronous intermittent communication, their positions after entering the convex hull may always be time-varying. Finally, the theoretical finding is verified by a simulation example.