Sampled position feedback consensus of multiple double integrators with jointly-connected topologies

This paper studies the consensus problem of a group of multiple double integrators where each one is able to use the position measurement relative to its neighbors at certain sampling instants. It is assumed that the network has switching but jointly-connected topologies in the sense that the union of the associated graphs over a certain time interval always has a spanning tree. Under this assumption, a linear sampled position feedback controller is proposed to achieve full state consensus for a sufficiently small sampling period.