Group consensus in multi-agent systems with switching topologies and communication delays

Group consensus problems in networks of dynamic agents are addressed for two cases: (i) communication topologies are switching and the switching occurs among finite topologies arbitrarily; (ii) communication topologies are switching and the switching occurs among finite topologies arbitrarily, and there exist communication delays. We introduce double-tree-form transformations under which dynamic equations of agents are transformed into reduced-order systems. Based on the reduced-order systems, we obtain some analysis results for the two cases. In addition, we further investigate multi-group consensus as an extension of the group consensus, and present some analysis results by similar techniques. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.