A Network Transformation Mapping Approach to Synchronization of Multi-Agent Systems With Disconnected Switching Topologies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a network transformation method for synchronizing multi-agent systems with randomly disconnected and reconnected links, ensuring asymptotic synchronization despite switching topologies.

Contribution

It proposes a novel network transformation mapping approach that handles random link disconnections and reconnections, extending synchronization strategies to more general switching topologies.

Findings

The method achieves asymptotic synchronization under random switching topologies.

Adaptive strategies reduce computational complexity of the network transformation.

Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

This paper focuses on the multi-agent synchronization problem with an open-loop unstable leader and followers under the switching topologies. For this issue, the typical approach is intermittent communication (including a spanning tree intermittently) or fast switching strategy. We here consider a more general scenario where each communication link between two agents is randomly disconnected and reconnected, and the durations of both the disconnected intervals and the connected intervals follow negative exponential distributions. To handle this issue, we propose a network transformation mapping method that divides the communication network into reachable and unreachable parts at any time. A node can access the leader's information and synchronize only when it lies in the reachable part; otherwise, it cannot. For each node, the synchronization speed is designed such that its convergence amplitude in the reachable part exceeds its divergence amplitude in the unreachable part. Hence, all nodes achieve asymptotic synchronization over the entire time domain. We further develop adaptive strategies for coupling gains to reduce the computational complexity introduced by the network transformation mapping. The proposed method is also applicable to jointly connected switching topologies and distributed observers under topologies that lack a spanning tree at any time. Finally, two numerical simulations -- synchronous control of multi-one-link manipulator systems and multi-motor systems based on Fieldbus -- are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.