Couple-Group Consensus: A Class of Delayed Heterogeneous Multiagent Systems in Competitive Networks

This paper discusses the couple-group consensus issues of a class of heterogeneous multiagent systems containing first-order and second-order dynamic agents under the influence of both input and communication delays. In distinction to the existing works, a novel distributed coordination control protocol is proposed which is not only on the foundation of the competitive interaction between the agents but also has no virtual velocity estimation in the first-order dynamics. Furthermore, without the restrictive assumptions existing commonly in the related works, several sufficient algebraic criteria are established for the heterogeneous systems to realize couple-group consensus asymptotically. The obtained conclusions show that the achievement of the systems’ couple-group consensus intimately relates to the coupling weights between the agents, the systems control parameters, and the input time delays of the agents, while communication time delays between the agents are irrelevant to it. Finally, several simulations are illustrated to verify the effectiveness of the obtained theoretical results