Leader-following consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems with switching topologies and unreliable communications

In this paper, distributed leader-following consensus for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems with switching topologies and unreliable communications is studied. Each possible topology contains a directed spanning tree rooted at the leader. Agents share the information only with their neighbors on some disconnected time intervals due to the unreliable communications. By designing suitable distributed controllers, all follower nodes asymptotically synchronize to the leader node if the communication rate is larger than a threshold value for each time interval. By using multiple Lyapunov functions theory and linear matrix inequalities technique, some sufficient conditions are given to guarantee the consensus. Moreover, based on the theoretical results, the admissible communication rate and convergence rate of the whole systems are adjusted by the feedback gain matrix, which provides helpful design guidelines in practical applications. Finally, a simulation example is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.