Consensus of heterogeneous multi-agent systems under switching directed topologies

The consensus problem is addressed in this paper for a class of heterogeneous multi-agent systems under directed and switching topologies. A mild connectivity assumption on the switching topologies is imposed, which allows them to be directed and uniformly quasi-strongly delta-connected. The orders of all agents need not to be the same. We develop a node-duplication based technique to address the difficulty caused by the heterogeneous dynamics and switching topologies. By the node-duplication based technique, we design a distributed controller which only requires the output information to be exchanged through the communication networks. It is further proved that the proposed scheme enables the outputs of all agents to reach consensus, and the other states of all agents converge to zero. An example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.