Consensus Analysis over Clustered Networks of Multi-Agent Systems under External Disturbances

TL;DR

This paper develops a consensus protocol for multi-agent systems with clustered networks under external disturbances, combining continuous intra-cluster communication and discrete inter-cluster information exchange, ensuring robustness and convergence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel consensus protocol that integrates continuous intra-cluster and discrete inter-cluster communication, addressing external disturbances in clustered multi-agent systems.

Findings

Achieves consensus despite external disturbances.

Ensures robust $\,\mathcal{H}_{\infty}$ consensus.

Validates effectiveness through numerical example.

Abstract

This paper studies a consensus problem of multi-agent systems subjected to external disturbances over the clustered network. It considers that the agents are divided into several clusters. They are almost all the time isolated one from another, which has a directed spanning tree. The goal of agents achieves a common value. To support interaction between clusters with a minimum exchange of information, we consider that each cluster has an agent, who can exchange information to any agents outside of its cluster at some discrete instants of time. Our main contribution proposes a consensus protocol, which takes into account the continuous-time communications among agents inside the clusters and discrete-time communication information across clusters. Accordingly, the consensus and the robust $\mathcal{H}_{\infty}$ consensus over the clustered network are respectively analyzed. Thanks to results from matrix theory and algebraic graph theory, we show that the proposed control protocols can solve the problems mentioned above. Finally, a numerical example is given to show the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results.