Cooperative tracking control for general linear multiagent systems with directed intermittent communications: An artificial delay approach

This paper investigates the consensus tracking problem for general linear multiagent systems on directed graph containing a spanning tree. For the considered linear systems, the consensus tracking aim cannot be achieved by using only memoryless static relative output feedbacks. Of particular interest is that both current and delayed relative output information of agents are required to achieve consensus. For the case of continuous communication among agents, an artificial delay output feedback control method is proposed. By utilizing the Taylor representation for the delayed signal with the remainder in the integral form, a delay-dependent sufficient condition is presented to guarantee the exponential convergence of the global tracking error systems. For the intermittent case, the consensus tracking performance can still be guaranteed based on a multiple graph-dependent Lyapunov functionals method. It is theoretically revealed that the time delay plays a key role in the exponential convergence of the closed-loop systems, and the definite relationships among the time delay, network structure, communication rate, and consensus convergence rate are also provided. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is confirmed by numerical simulations.