A Hybrid Switching Control Approach to Consensus of Multiagent Systems

This article develops a novel hybrid switching control (HSC) approach to the consensus of multiagent systems (MASs), and the objective is to further improve the transient consensus performance compared with a reset control approach in recent results. First, a hybrid switched controller is introduced, which consists of two working modes: 1) reset control mode and 2) gain mode. Through appropriate switching mechanism design, the controller output signal can be guaranteed to be continuous, and the input–output of the switched controller always has the same sign. Then, HSC is applied to the consensus of MAS, and a consensus protocol consisting of proportional control part and HSC part is proposed. By introducing binary-value variables, an appropriate closed-loop model is constructed, and the Lyapunov-based consensus analysis results are obtained. Finally, an example is provided to show the superiority of the proposed approach.