Distributed coordination of dynamical multi-agent systems under directed graphs and constrained information exchange

The distributed coordination problem of multi-agent systems is addressed under the assumption of intermittent discrete-time information exchange with time-varying (possibly unbounded) delays. Specifically, we consider the containment control problem of second-order multi-agent systems with multiple dynamic leaders under a directed interconnection graph topology. First, we present distributed control algorithms for double integrator dynamics in the full and partial state feedback cases. Thereafter, we propose a method to extend our results to second-order systems with locally Lipschitz nonlinear dynamics. We show that, under the same information exchange constraints, our approach can be applied to solve similar coordination problems for other types of complex second-order multi-agent systems, such as harmonic oscillators. In all cases, our control objectives are achieved under some conditions that can be realized independently from the interconnection topology and from the characteristics of the communication process. The effectiveness of the proposed control schemes is illustrated through some examples and numerical simulations.