Consensus tracking of nonlinear multi-agent systems with switching directed topologies

This paper addresses the distributed consensus tracking problem for a class of multi-agent systems with Lipschitz-type node dynamics in the presence of a single leader. The main contribution in the present work is to solve the consensus tracking problem without the over-idealized assumption that the communication topology among dynamic agents is strongly connected and fixed. A distributed protocol based only on the relative states between neighboring agents is designed. Then, by using tools from nonnegative matrix analysis and switching systems theory, it is theoretically shown that consensus tracking in a closed-loop multi-agent network with a switching directed topology can be achieved if there always exists a directed path from the leader to each follower, with the control parameters suitably selected.