ABSTRACT
The consensus problem of multi-agent systems has received compelling attention in the control and system community due to its broad applications in many areas, such as unmanned vehicles, formation control and flocking. The basic objective of consensus is to design protocols, based on local information of agents, which guarantee that the states of all agents converge to a common value. The consensus protocol was initially designed for systems of first-order agents and then extended to systems of second-order dynamics. It has been shown that the first-order consensus can always be reached if certain connectivity conditions are satisfied; however, the second-order consensus relies not only on the connectivity of the communication topology but also on the parameters of consensus protocols. Time delays may arise naturally, which are usually the key factors that influence the stability of multiagent systems.
