Synchronisation of linear continuous multi-agent systems with switching topology and communication delay

A distributed dynamic output feedback control is designed by Scardovi and Sepulchre for the synchronisation of a network of identical linear systems, known as agents in literature. The design is based on some mild conditions allowing switching topology. However, it assumes that there is no time delay in signal transfer between the neighbouring agents. In this study, the authors extend their work to include known time delay in communications. Furthermore, the authors´ design has some special features: (i) the delay can be arbitrary and only need to be uniformly bounded by a constant; (ii) the conditions that time delay should be the same and sufficiently small in some literature are not required here; and (iii) no local buffer is required to store past data because of time-delay effect.