Signed Average Consensus in Cooperative-Antagonistic Multi-Agent Systems with multiple communication time-varying delays

This article addresses the distributed average consensus problem for cooperative-antagonistic Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) in the presence of multiple and unknown communication time-varying input delays, whose actual values depend on the effective conditions of the wireless channels. A distributed delayed control strategy, able to counteract the unavoidable communication impairments, is proposed for the achievement of the exponential stability of the networked control system. The convergence analysis, which leverages the Lyapunov stability and Halanay's lemma, also handles the fast time-varying delay case and analytically revels the relationship among the estimation of the maximum delay upper-bound, the smallest nonzero eigenvalue of Laplacian matrix, i.e. the Fiedler eigenvalue, and the control gain. Finally, numerical simulations confrm the theoretical derivation.