Distributed nonlinear control of multi-agent systems with switching topologies

This paper studies the distributed nonlinear control of multi-agent systems with switching topologies for output agreement. A novel cyclic-small-gain approach is proposed. The crucial idea is to introduce a new dynamic mechanism to process the exchanged information between the agents, and to transform the distributed control problem into a stabilization problem for a dynamic network composed of input-to-output stable (IOS) subsystems. The desired distributed controller is designed based on IOS and cyclic-small-gain techniques. More interestingly, it is shown that the proposed method can be extended to distributed control design in the presence of disturbances.