Guaranteed cost consensus problems for multi-agent systems with switching topologies are investigated. Firstly, guaranteed cost consensus for multi-agent systems is introduced based on state errors among neighboring agents and control inputs of all agents, where a tradeoff between the consensus regulation performance and the control effort is considered. Then, a sufficient condition for guaranteed cost consensus is given by the state-space decomposition approach and the Lyapunov method, where an upper bound of the cost function is determined and an approach is proposed to determine the control gain. It is worth mentioning that the criterions for guaranteed cost consensus are only dependent on the maximum eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrices of switching topologies. Finally, numerical simulations are given to demonstrate theoretical results. more challenging. Cao and Ren [16] studied the consensus problems with undirected and directed topologies with a sampled-data setting. In [17], the consensus for multi-agent systems with directed topologies was considered. Xi et al. [18] investigated consensus problems by the partial stability method, where the interaction topologies for multi-agent systems were directed. In [19], linear matrix inequality (LMI) criterions for consensus problems of multi-agent systems with bounded time-varying delays were presented. In [20], the cases with unbounded time-varying delays were dealt with. Ma and Zhang [21] showed that both the dynamic structure of each agent and interaction topologies impact on the consensualizability properties of multi-agent systems.It should be pointed out that consensus problems for multi-agent systems with switching topologies are more complicated because the neighboring set of each agent is time varying. The consensus problems for multi-agent systems were studied in [22], where it was assumed that all the possible topologies were undirected and connected. Su and Huang [23] relaxed the connection conditions in [22] to the joint connection cases. In [24][25][26][27][28][29], consensus problems for multi-agent systems with switching directed topologies were investigated. In [24], it was shown that consensus can be achieved asymptotically if the joint topology of the directed topologies had a spanning tree frequently enough as multi-agent systems evolve. Xiao and Wang [25] investigated consensus problems with bounded time-varying delays based on the properties of non-negative matrices. In [26], sufficient conditions for consensus of multi-agent systems with constant time delays and finite timevarying delays were given by LMIs. The consensus control problems for discrete-time multi-agent systems with stochastic noises were considered in [27]. Münz et al. [28] addressed the cases with arbitrarily large time delays, where a spanning tree should be contained in the joint topology of switching topologies in finite time. The paper [29] was devoted to the consensus problem of multiagent systems with switching topologies, where external disturbance was considered. It s...