Leader-following consensus for a class of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems

• Published in: Systems & control letters Vol. 89; pp. 61 - 65
• Main Authors: Wang, Chuanrui, Wang, Xinghu, Ji, Haibo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01-03-2016
• Subjects: Adaptive control systems; Directed topology; Distributed control; Dynamical systems; Graph theory; Mathematical analysis; Mathematical models; Multi-agent systems; Multiagent systems; Nonlinear dynamics; Nonlinear systems; Nonlinearity; Distributed control; Directed topology; Nonlinear systems; Multi-agent systems
• ISSN: 0167-6911; 1872-7956
• DOI: 10.1016/j.sysconle.2015.12.007

This paper deals with the leader-following consensus problem for a class of multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics and directed communication topology. The control input of the leader agent is assumed to be unknown to all follower agents. A distributed adaptive nonlinear control law is constructed using the relative state information between neighboring agents, which achieves leader-following consensus for any directed communication graph that contains a spanning tree with the root node being the leader agent. Compared with previous results, the nonlinear functions are not required to satisfy the globally Lipschitz or Lipschitz-like condition and the adaptive consensus protocol is in a distributed fashion. A numerical example is given to verify our proposed protocol.