A Stochastic Sampling Mechanism for Time-Varying Formation of Multiagent Systems With Multiple Leaders and Communication Delays

The time-varying formation problem for multiagent systems (MASs) with stochastic sampling and multiple leaders is studied in this paper, in which communication delays are taken into account. All the agents are divided into the set of the follower group and the set of the leader group. Under the proposed stochastic sampling mechanism for time-varying formation of the MASs with communication delays, the followers are driven to achieve time-varying formation where the center of the formation is the convex combination of the states of the leaders. In the theoretical analysis, sufficient conditions for the MASs achieving time-varying formation in mean square under stochastic sampling with multiple leaders and communication delays are derived. Moreover, some corollaries are also given in this paper. Finally, the theoretical analysis is verified by a given simulation example.