Output Reachable Set-Based Leader-Following Consensus of Positive Agents Over Switching Networks

This work addresses the output reachable set-based leader-following consensus problem, focusing on a group of positive agents over directed dwell-time switching networks. Two types of non-negative disturbances, namely, 1) L₁ -norm bounded disturbances and 2) L_∞,1 -norm bounded disturbances are studied. Meanwhile, a class of directed dwell-time switching networks for modeling the communication protocol of positive agents is investigated. To deal with the presence of disturbances, an output-feedback control protocol is developed to achieve a robust consensus with positivity preserved based on the output reachable set. By exploiting the positive characteristics, switched linear copositive Lyapunov functions are adopted to establish output reachable set-based consensus conditions. These conditions can facilitate the control protocol design by solving a bilinear programming problem, and also generate hyperpyramidal regions to confine the output consensus error. A particle swarm optimization-based (PSO-based) algorithm is applied to compute the controller gains and optimize the volume of the hyperpyramids. The proposed methods are verified by the presented numerical case studies.