Consensus Problem in High-Order Multiagent Systems With Lipschitz Nonlinearities and Jointly Connected Topologies

The leaderless consensus problem in a class of high-order multiagent systems with Lipschitz nonlinearities is studied in this paper. Despite existing leaderless consensus protocols devoted to high-order multiagent systems with Lipschitz nonlinearities, the proposed protocol in this paper guarantees achieving consensus in networks of agents with jointly connected topologies. To achieve this goal, first a consensus protocol for high-order multiagent systems with general linear models is proposed. By introducing a common Lyapunov candidate for the set of switching topologies and based on the Cauchy convergence criterion, achieving consensus under the proposed protocol is studied. Then, sufficient conditions are derived under which the results are extended to the case of Lipschitz nonlinearities in agents models. Numerical examples validate the proposed consensus protocol.