Synchronising second-order multi-agent systems under dynamic topology via reference model-based algorithm

This paper revisits the synchronisation problem for second-order multi-agent systems (MASs) under dynamically changing communication topology. By employing the reference model-based synchronisation algorithm, it is finally shown that synchronisation for both the position and velocity states can be achieved if the union of the communication topologies has a directed spanning tree frequently enough. This extends the existing results obtained for second-order MASs which exploits mild communication topology condition guaranteeing the synchronisation to a more general case. Convergence analysis is successfully performed by exploiting the product properties of row-stochastic matrices, which can also provide us with an estimate the convergence rate towards the synchronisation.