Network-based leader-following consensus for distributed multi-agent systems

This paper is concerned with network-based leader-following consensus for a distributed multi-agent system. A network-based consensus control protocol under a directed graph is proposed. With this protocol, each agent in the distributed multi-agent system can be remotely controlled via a communication network. A new delay-dependent stability criterion for an error system is derived by constructing a novel Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional with digraph information. Then, employing this stability criterion, a delay-dependent sufficient condition for the existence of network-based consensus controllers, which ensure that the following-agent’s states can reach an agreement on the leader’s state, is formulated in terms of linear matrix inequalities. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the obtained results.