Asymptotic consensus via switching adaptive for nonlinear multi‐agent systems subject to atypical disturbances

Abstract

SummaryThe paper is devoted to the asymptotic output consensus for a class of uncertain nonlinear multi‐agent systems. The disturbance that the system suffered is said to be “atypical" since, unlike the related literature, it is unnecessarily continuously differentiable (e.g., sawtooth wave), and even permitted to be discontinuous (e.g., square wave), despite requiring it to be of unknown integer multiples of certain period. Typically, the multi‐agent systems admit more than one ingredient causing heterogeneities: (i) No identical requirement is made on the system nonlinearities and input directions (the unknown signs of the input coefficients). (ii) The orders of agent dynamics can be different (the dynamics are first‐order, second‐order, or even high‐order). Nevertheless, in the context, we still pursue the asymptotic output consensus, and unlike some related literature, instead of seeking a time‐varying strategy which means the introduction of infinitely large gains, we combine a refined switching strategy with continuous adaptive one together to propose a new consensus protocol. It turns out that under the proposed protocol, all the agent outputs reach a common value while all the closed‐loop signals are bounded. Simulation examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.