Cluster consensus of high-order multi-agent systems with switching topologies

This paper investigates the cluster consensus problems of generic linear multi-agent systems with switching topologies. Sufficient criteria for cluster consensus, which generalise the results in existing literatures, are derived for both state feedback and observer-based control schemes. By using an averaging method, it is shown that cluster consensus can be achieved when the union of the acyclic topologies contains a directed spanning tree within each cluster frequently enough. We also provide a principle to construct digraphs with inter-cluster cyclic couplings that promote cluster consensus regardless of the magnitude of inter-agent coupling weights. Finally, numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.