On consensus of linear multi-agent systems with switching topologies: A dynamic output feedback approach

This paper studies a consensus problem of linear multi-agent systems with switching communication topologies based on dynamic output feedback approach. Agents are described by the general continuous-time or discrete-time linear time-invariant dynamics. Each agent can only measure its output rather than the full state. To solve this difficulty, a dynamic output feedback approach is proposed to estimate agent's state, and the estimated state is sent to the connected agents. Then a distributed protocol is proposed for the multi-agent system to reach a consensus. It is proved that the sufficient conditions for ensuing consensus are: each communication topology graph occurred in the time course is a balanced graph including a spanning tree; the system matrices of every agent are stabilizable and detectable; the input matrix is not a zero matrix and the dwell time of the system is larger than a given constant. Finally, a simulation example is given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.