On the Consensus of Dynamic Multi-agent Systems with Changing Topology

Abstract

This paper proposes relaxed sufficient conditions for the consensus of multi-agent systems by the averaging protocol with time-varying system topology. Bidirectional information exchange between neighboring agents is considered and both the discrete-time and continuous-time consensus protocols are studied. It is shown that the consensus is reached if there exists an unbounded time sequence such that two agents who own the maximum and minimum states at each time instant in the sequence will be jointly connected at some future time.