Output Consensus of Heterogeneous Multi‐Agent Systems With Time‐Varying Communication Delays, Input Delays and Intermittent Observations

ABSTRACT The consensus problem of heterogeneous linear multi‐agent systems (MASs) with simultaneous time‐varying communication delays, input delays, and intermittent observations is investigated in this paper. First, in order to deal with time‐varying communication delays, a common signal is constructed for each agent by introducing an internal reference model. Second, the optimal estimator is derived to estimate the states of each agent based on the intermittent observations. Finally, it is shown that the closed‐loop control systems can reach output consensus under certain conditions. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by a simulation example.