Research on consensus of multi-agent systems with and without input saturation constraints

In recent years, with the continuous development of multi-agent technology represented by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm, consensus control has become a hot spot in academic research. In this paper, we put forward a discrete-time consensus protocol and obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions for the second-order consensus of the second-order multi-agent system with a fixed structure under the condition of no saturation input. The theoretical derivation verifies that the two eigenvalues of the Laplacian of the communication network matrix and the sampling period have an important effect on achieving consensus. Then we construct and verify sufficient conditions to achieve consensus under the condition of input saturation constraints. The results show that consensus can be achieved if velocity, position gain, and sampling period satisfy a set of inequalities related to the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix. Finally, the accuracy and validity of the theoretical results are proved by numerical simulations.