Consensus of Saturated Multiagent Systems: Tolerance to Nonidentical Asymmetric Saturation Levels

This article explores the input saturation effect with nonidentical asymmetric levels in the multiagent consensus over a switching directed topology of weak connectivity. In particular, the saturation level for each agent is not symmetric, while the saturation levels associated with distinct agents are nonidentical. Both the continuous- and discrete-time cases are considered. For both the saturated multiagent systems, it is proven with the nonlinear contraction analysis that the conventional distributed protocols are sufficient for the achievement of the consensus given a uniformly jointly strongly connected topology condition, which does not require persistent connectivity. This thus confirms the tolerance of the multiagent consensus to generic input saturation constraints with the nonidentical asymmetric levels. Simulations are shown to confirm the established consensus results.