Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems With Piecewise Continuous Time-Varying Topology

This paper studies the consensus of multi-agent systems with piecewise continuous time-varying topology. The agents are assumed to have identical first-order linear dynamics, which their underlying communication topology is piecewise continuous time-varying. In the case of undirected time-varying communication topology, the consensus of the multi-agent system depends on the connectivity of its limit topology, and the states of all agents converge to the mean of their initial states. However, the consensus depends on the absolute integrability of the elements in the difference matrix between the Laplacian matrix and the limit matrix when the communication topology is directed and connected. Several simulation examples are presented to validate the proposed theories.