Coordination on Open Double-Integrator Multi-Agent Systems

This letter studies the consensus problem of a double-integrator open multi-agent system (OMAS) when agents are permitted to depart and arrive at any time. With regards to this, a distributed algorithm is designed to extensively generalize the usual efforts in multi-agent theory. It is shown that the proposed scheme can assure consensus of interacting agents, and further argued that average consensus is attainable. Moreover, it is proved that sum of agents' position or velocity information in essence links to the related initial values. As an extension, leader-following problem in an OMAS setting is also discussed, naturally suggesting a nontrivial effort when in comparison with the leaderless case. Finally, a numerical test is given to support the proposed method and the derived results.