Group Hybrid Coordination Control of Multi-Agent Systems With Time-Delays and Additive Noises

A new kind of group coordination control problem-group hybrid coordination control is investigated in this paper. The group hybrid coordination control means that in a whole multi-agent system (MAS) that consists of two subgroups with communications between them, agents in the two subgroups achieve consensus and containment, respectively. For MASs with both time-delays and additive noises, two group control protocols are proposed to solve this problem for the containment-oriented case and consensus-oriented case, respectively. By developing a new analysis idea, some sufficient conditions and necessary conditions related to the communication intensity between the two sub-groups are obtained for the following two types of group hybrid coordination behavior: 1) Agents in one subgroup and in another subgroup achieve weak consensus and containment, respectively; 2) Agents in one subgroup and in another subgroup achieve strong consensus and containment, respectively. It is revealed that the decay of the communication impact between the two sub-groups is necessary for the consensus-oriented case. Finally, the validity of the group control results is verified by several simulation examples.