Asynchronous consensus of continuous-time Lagrangian systems with switching topology and non-uniform time delay

•A consensus protocol is proposed for a class of nonlinear continuous-time multi-agent systems with discontinuous information transmission between agents.•The communication topology among the agents is switching.•Agents receive their neighbors’ information with bounded nonuniform time-varying delays.•Communications are not continuous and updating neighbors information is asynchronous.•This protocol tolerates arbitrary bounded time delays if the communication topology is modeled by a jointly weakly connected graph.

This paper presents a novel asynchronous algorithm for consensus problem of a class of nonlinear continuous-time multi-agent systems with discontinuous information transmission between agents. The communication topology among the agents is switching and agents receive information in discrete time instants with a bounded nonuniform time delay. Using feedback linearization, Lagrangian dynamics of agents are transformed to double integrator dynamics. A state transformation is applied to obtain a non-delayed extended state space and then the proposed controller provides consensus. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.