A Novel Asynchronous Intermittent Control Approach for Distributed Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems With Output Delays

In this paper, a novel boundary-dependent asynchronous intermittent control scheme is proposed to realize the distributed consensus of multi-agent systems with output delays. Different from most works on intermittent control, this intermittent mechanism allows each agent to asynchronously adjust the intermittent time according to their actual control needs. In this intermittent mechanism, the non-negative real area is divided into three sub-regions through two boundary lines (safety boundary and intermittence boundary) to detect the error states of each agent, and a new intermittent mode is presented to arrange work period and break period by the detected real-time error states. By developing the distributed cascade compensator, a novel intermittent distributed cascade consensus mechanism is designed to ensure that all the agents achieve leader-following consensus. Compared with the current time-dependent mechanisms, the proposed boundary-dependent intermittent control mechanism can adjust work and break periods of each agent asynchronously according to the application needs, under which the multi-agent systems can tolerate more break period and reduce the communication frequency. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to verify our results.