A leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems with actuator saturation and semi-Markov switching topologies

The leader-following consensus (LFC) issue was investigated in this paper for multi-agent systems (MASs) subject to actuator saturation with semi-Markov switching topologies (SMST). A new consensus protocol was proposed by using a semi-Markov process to model the switching of network topologies. Compared to the traditional Markov switching topologies, the SMST is more general and practical because the transition rates are time-varying. Using the local sector conditions and a suitable Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, some sufficient conditions are proposed such that the leaderfollowing mean-square consensus is locally achieved. Based on the derived sufficient conditions, an optimization problem was analyzed to determine the consensus feedback gains and to find a maximal estimate of the domain of consensus attraction (DOCA) of a closed-loop model. Thus, a numerical case was presented to verify the performance of the design method.