Leader-Following Consensus of Discrete-Time Multi-agent Systems with a Smart Leader

Abstract

In this paper, the consensus problem of discrete-time general linear multi-agent systems with a smart leader is studied. Unlike the previous works, an objective function is designed to decide whether the leader can receive information from the followers, with the purpose of effectively reducing the controller’s energy consumption. In order to track the desired target state, a new distributed control protocol is proposed for the multi-agent systems. By utilizing the Lyapunov function technology, some new sufficient conditions are established, which can ensure the leader-following consensus for discrete-time multi-agent systems with fixed topology and switching topology. In addition, the corresponding gain matrices are also obtained. Finally, simulation results are provided to demonstrate the theoretical results.