On the bipartite consensus of higher-order multi-agent systems with antagonistic interactions and switching topologies

In this paper we, investigate the bipartite consensus of higher-order multiagent systems, by assuming that the interactions among agents are either cooperative or antagonistic and that the communication graph switches among a finite number of possible configurations.We first show that the “lifting approach”, proposed in [3] to model opinion dynamics in case of antagonistic interactions and agents modeled as integrators, can be extended to the case of higher order multi-agent systems with cooperative/antagonistic interactions and switching topologies. Subsequently,we are able to translate the bipartite consensus problem into a consensus problem among cooperative agents with switching topologies. This allows us to make use of the results obtained in [13] and hence to solve the bipartite consensus problem.