Distributed output agreement of PWM‐controlled double‐integrator multi‐agent systems with switching topologies.

This paper studies the distributed pulse‐width‐modulation (PWM) control problem for double‐integrator multi‐agent systems with switching topologies. Usually, a PWM control signal updates only on discrete‐time sample instants and only takes three constant values. This means that the methods based on linear and continuous designs are not directly applicable. The major contribution of this paper is that a new class of distributed PWM controllers, which feature nested saturated loops, is proposed. With the new design, the outputs of the controlled agents asymptotically converge to each other, as long as a mild connectivity condition is satisfied. The validity of the proposed PWM controller is proved based on a new invariant‐set‐like method. This work first shows that the state of each PWM‐controlled agent stays within an appropriately chosen closed set if the interactions are bounded. Then, under a mild connectivity condition, the state boundedness and convergence of the closed‐loop multi‐agent system by analyzing the boundedness of the interactions are proved. A numerical example is employed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]