Synchronization of nonlinear systems with communication delays and intermittent information exchange

This paper studies the synchronization problem of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems with intermittent communication in the presence of irregular communication delays and possible information losses. The control objective is to steer all agents' positions to a common position with a prescribed desired velocity available only to some leaders. Based on the small-gain framework, we propose a synchronization scheme relying on an intermittent information exchange protocol in the presence of time delays and possible packet dropouts. We show that our control objectives are achieved with a simple selection of the control gains provided that the directed graph, describing the interconnection between agents, contains a spanning tree. An example of Euler-Lagrange systems is considered to illustrate the application and effectiveness of the proposed approach. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.