Sliding mode control for multi‐agent systems under stochastic communication protocol

Abstract This article investigates the consensus problem for the multi‐agent system (MAS) via a sliding mode control method. The stochastic communication protocol (SCP) obeying Markovian chain is adopted to schedule the information transmission among agents, by which only one state component of each agent is stochastically selected and transmitted to other agents at each transmission instant. Through the use of the merging technique, a joint Markovian chain is introduced to model the multi‐agent consensus error system. And then, a distributed sliding mode controller is designed to achieve the stochastic consensus of the MAS. Meanwhile, the desired controller gain matrix is obtained via solving a minimization problem. Finally, a numerical example has been provided to illustrate the proposed results.