Distributed leader-follower consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems with unconsensusable switching topologies and its application to flexible-joint manipulators

This paper investigates the distributed consensus problem of nonlinear multi-agent systems with switching topologies under a leader-follower framework. In particular, the unconsensusable switching topology is considered for modelling communication failures, which is more practical in the applications. By adopting the novel mode-dependent average dwell time, sufficient consensus conditions are established and the corresponding topology-dependent consensus gains are designed in term of linear matrix inequalities. In the end, an illustrative example with application to multiple flexible-joint manipulators is provided to verify the effectiveness of our proposed design method