Robust consensus of multiple inertial agents with coupling delays and variable topologies

In this paper, we consider the exponential second‐order consensus problem of a network of inertial agents with time‐varying coupling delays and variable balanced topologies. The passive decomposition approach is employed to incorporate the agents' inertial effect into the distributed control design. The sufficient conditions for the exponential second‐order consensus are provided, both when the topology is switched arbitrarily (without dwell time between consecutive switches) and when it is switched with average dwell time. The results present conditions that must be satisfied by the controller design parameters and performance requirements. Furthermore, an approach to the design of consensus protocol is presented, which is robust to the time delays and the dynamically changing interaction topologies. Numerical examples are given to illustrate our theoretical results.