Leaderless and Leader-Following Bipartite Consensus of Multiagent Systems With Sampled and Delayed Information

This article proposes a hybrid systems approach to address the sampled-data leaderless and leader-following bipartite consensus problems of multiagent systems (MAS) with communication delays. First, distributed asynchronous sampled-data bipartite consensus protocols are proposed based on estimators. Then, by introducing appropriate intermediate variables and internal auxiliary variables, a unified hybrid model, consisting of flow dynamics and jump dynamics, is constructed to describe the closed-loop dynamics of both leaderless and leader-following MAS. Based on this model, the leaderless and leader-following bipartite consensus is equivalent to stability of a hybrid system, and Lyapunov-based stability results are then developed under hybrid systems framework. With the proposed method, explicit upper bounds of sampling periods and communication delays can be calculated. Finally, simulation examples are given to show the effectiveness.