Sampled-Data Consensus Control of MAS Under Switching Network

In Chaps. 2 and 3, for MASs, we have investigated the problem of how to regulate the information transmissions over a connected network, and presented the sufficient conditions to make the proposed sampled-data based control protocol be feasible to address some network induced issues including time delays and packet losses. It is remarkable that these network induced issues can be viewed as in-process problems, that is, the communication connections has been preconstructed in the sense that what information is available for a certain agent is specified via a fixed communication graph, and the occurrence of these issues is only during the communicating process. The fixed graph implies that communication connections among agents do not change again, while if we want to take into account the communication link failure and link creation, reconfigurable networks and nearest neighbor coupling, the communication topology will be no more fixed but time-dependent. Such changes of connections among agents lead to network switching phenomenon, which is different from in-process problems, and can interrupt the communicating process at any time and change the current connection structure.