Leader-following consensus protocol design of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems with unmodeled dynamics

Abstract

The leader-following consensus problem is investigated for a class of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems in this paper, where unmodeled dynamics are contained in the multi-agent systems and the control input of leader agent is unknown to follower agents. A distributed protocol, which contains a designed signal to dominate the effects of unmodeled dynamics, is proposed to solve the consensus problem for the nonlinear multi-agent systems. It is proven that the leader-following consensus is achieved by the presented protocol under undirected topologies. Then the result is extended to the case when topologies are directed, where any communication graph only contains a spanning tree with the root vertex being the leader agent. Two numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocols.