Observer-based consensus tracking of multi-agent systems with one-sided Lipschitz nonlinearity

This paper investigates the observer-based consensus tracking problem of multi-agent systems with one-sided Lipschitz nonlinearity. The agent dynamics considered here covers a broad family of nonlinear systems, and includes the well-known Lipschitz system as a special case. To achieve consensus tracking for such multi-agent systems, two types of observer-based protocols named the continuous protocol and the intermittent protocol are proposed. Furthermore, several multi-step design algorithms are presented to select the observer gains and the controller parameters of the proposed protocols. It is shown that the established sufficient criteria can not only ensure the observer error to approach to zero, but also realize the consensus tracking of multi-agent systems. The obtained results are illustrated by two simulation examples.