Cluster consensus of multi-agent systems with general linear and nonlinear dynamics via intermittent adaptive pinning control

This paper investigates the cluster consensus of multi-agent systems (MASs) with general linear and nonlinear dynamics via intermittent adaptive pinning control, where each cluster has a virtual leader whose state can be sensed by only a small part of followers on some disconnected time intervals because of communication constraints. The communication topology is considered to be weakly connected, that is, it is not necessary to be in-degree balanced, strongly connected or contain a directed spanning tree. To realise the cluster consensus, a class of intermittent adaptive pinning control protocols is proposed according to difference that the agents receive information source. The pinning gains are designed to be intermittent adaptive and with an exponential convergence rate, which will effectively reduce communication costs, avoid the pinning gains being larger than those needed in practice. Meanwhile, it guarantees that the pinning gains quickly converge to steady value. Correspondingly, some sufficient consensus criteria are derived to guarantee that the agents in the same cluster asymptotically can reach consensus while the agents in different clusters can reach different consensus. Rigorous proofs are given by the aid of Lyapunov stability theory and matrix theory. Finally, a numerical simulation example is presented to validate the main results.