Pose consensus control of multi-agent rigid body systems with homogenous and heterogeneous communication delays

A new strategy for full pose and velocity consensus control of multi-agent rigid body systems in the presence of communication delays is presented. Specifically, consensus protocols are proposed for a system of N heterogeneous rigid bodies on the Banach manifold associated with the tangent bundle (Formula presented.), under a fixed and undirected communication topology, where the attitudes of the rigid bodies are described in terms of rotation matrices. The stability argument is strengthened from that used in prior studies by using an extension of Morse–Lyapunov–Krasovskii approach, and sufficient conditions are derived to achieve almost global asymptotic stability of the consensus subspace. Finally, illustrative examples are given to demonstrate the proposed method where both homogenous and heterogeneous communication delays are considered.