Asynchronous impulsive containment control in switched multi-agent systems

A novel impulsive containment control is derived for multi-agent systems with the switching behavior and time delay, where an asynchronous impulsive control formulation is introduced in a distributed synthesis. Containment control criterion is established by using multiple Lyapunov functions and the Razumikhin technique in terms of mathematical induction. The relationship between impulsive control and the average dwell time is presented and thus can serve as a tool to design an impulsive containment controller. Unlike traditional impulsive control strategies, the proposed methodology does not require time instants of impulsive control to simultaneously occur with switching signals, which significantly leads to a less conservativeness of the designed impulsive controller to handle the switched system. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a simulation example.