Swarm stability of heterogeneous multi-agent systems via periodically intermittent control

This paper investigates distributed leader-following swarm stability of heterogeneous multi-agent systems with periodically intermittent control. We assume that the agents in the network are nonidentical and the coupling matrix is balanced. Each heterogeneous follower is assumed to obtain some information from the leader and the neighbors only on a series of periodically time intervals. We show that the system will be exponentially stable. The stability properties are proved via theoretical analysis and verified via numerical simulations. The stability of the heterogeneous multi-agent systems is proved based on matrix theory and the Lyapunov stability theorem. A numerical example is shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical result.