Leader–follower consensus of time-varying nonlinear multi-agent systems

A distributed consensus protocol is developed for a class of homogeneous time-varying nonlinear multi-agent systems in this paper. The agents dynamics are supposed to be in the strict feedback form and satisfy Lipschitz conditions with time-varying gains. It is firstly shown that the leader–follower consensus problem is equivalent to a conventional stabilization control problem of augmented high-dimensional multi-variable systems. By introducing an appropriate state transformation, the stabilization control problem is then converted into a design problem of an appropriate time-varying parameter, which plays a key role to cope with the time-varying nonlinear terms in the concerned systems. It is proved that the exponential consensus of the multi-agent system can be achieved with the proposed consensus protocol. A simulation example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed consensus protocol.