  The distributed coordination problem of multi-agent systems is addressed in
this paper under the assumption of intermittent communication between agents in
the presence of time-varying communication delays. Specifically, we consider
the containment control problem of second-order multi-agent systems with
multiple dynamic leaders under a directed interconnection graph topology. Also,
communication between agents is performed only at some discrete instants of
time in the presence of irregular communication delays and packet dropout.
First, we present distributed control algorithms for double integrator dynamics
in the full and partial state feedback cases. Then, we propose a method to
extend our results to second-order systems with locally Lipschitz nonlinear
dynamics. In both cases, we show that the proposed approach leads to our
control objectives under sufficient conditions relating the characteristics of
the communication process and the control gains. We also show that our approach
can be applied to solve various similar coordination problems in multi-agent
systems under the same communication constraints. The effectiveness of the
proposed control schemes is illustrated through some examples and numerical
simulations.
