Consensus of linear multi-agent systems via reduced-order observer

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the consensus problem for continuous time linear multi-agent systems with directed communication topology. An estimation error dynamic is proposed to design the reduced-order observer for dealing with unknown coefficient matrices. To guarantee the consensus, control protocols based on the reduced-order observer are designed to utilize the relative outputs of neighboring agents whose communication topology contains a directed spanning tree. Then the algorithms are extended to the model reference consensus case, where the case of zero control input for reference node is not assumed. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of proposed approaches.