Mean square leader-following consensus of heterogeneous multi-agent systems with Markovian switching topologies and communication delays

This article considers the mean square leader-following output consensus problem of heterogeneous multi-agent systems under randomly switching topologies and time-varying communication delays. By modeling the switching topologies as a time-homogeneous Markov process and taking the communication delays into consideration, a distributed observer is proposed to estimate the state of the leader. A novel distributed output feedback controller is then designed. By constructing a novel switching Lyapunov functional, an easily-verifiable sufficient condition to achieve the mean square leader-following output consensus is given. Finally, two simulation examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.