Leader-following consensus of delayed multi-agent systems with aperiodically intermittent communications

In this paper, the leader-following consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems with time delay and aperiodically intermittent communications is investigated. Compared with the intermittent communications for multi-agent systems in previous literature, we relax the periodicity or quasi-periodicity of the intermittent communications and render the intermittent communications to be completely aperiodic. The concepts of average communication ratio and average communication period are adapted to characterize the distributions of communication time and non-communication time. Then the consensus problem for the studied systems with large time delay and small time delay is studied, respectively. Especially, for the case of small time delay, the upper bound of time delay is assumed to be less than the average communication length (average communication ratio x average communication period), but can be larger than some communication lengths, which is less conservative. Finally, numerical examples are provided to show the effectiveness of the main results. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.