A Dynamic Gain Approach to Consensus Control of Nonlinear Multiagent Systems With Time Delays

This article proposes a dynamic gain approach for investigating the leader–follower consensus problem of nonlinear multiagent systems with both distributed delays and discrete delays. It is assumed that each agent is in the strict-feedback form and satisfies the Lipschitz condition with an unknown constant. A novel dynamic gain observer is first constructed for each follower by only utilizing the output information of the follower and its neighbors. By introducing an observer, a distributed output-feedback control protocol is designed for each follower agent under a directed communication topology. It is proved by the Lyapunov–Razumikhin theorem that the consensus of the multiagent system is achieved with the proposed consensus protocol. Different from the existing results, the dynamic gain is constructed for each follower to propose the consensus protocol, without resorting to the celebrated backstepping technique. Moreover, the time-varying gain is designed in a uniform framework. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is illustrated by a simulation example.