Partial state consensus for networks of second-order dynamic agents

Abstract This paper addresses the partial state consensus problem of multi-agent systems with second-order agent dynamics and proposes an asynchronous distributed consensus protocol for the case with switching interaction topology, time-varying delays and intermittent information transmission. “Partial state consensus” means reaching an agreement asymptotically with each other on part, but not all, of each individual’s states, where the concerned states usually cannot be decoupled from the other ones. Partial state consensus has its broad applications in the coordination of multi-robot systems, distributed task management, and distributed estimation for sensor networks, etc. This paper assumes that position-like states are the only detectable information transmitted over the network and velocity-like states are the key quantities of interest, which are required to be equalized. We first give the asynchronous distributed protocol based on the delayed position-like state information and then provide its convergence result with respect to velocity-like states. It is shown that if the union of the interaction topology across the time interval with a given length always contains a spanning tree, then the proposed protocol will solve the partial state (velocity-like state) consensus problem asymptotically.