Observer based consensus for nonlinear multi-agent systems with communication failures

In this paper, consensus problem of general nonlinear multi-agent systems with communication failures is studied based on a distributed consensus algorithm. Under the assumption that the communication graphs are strongly connected, we derive some sufficient consensus criterion for both cases fixed and switched topologies using the relative measured output states of each agent. Moreover, the case that there is a leader in the communication graph is also explicitly investigated. Finally, simulation examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the obtained results.