Leader-following consensus for a class of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems

This paper deals with the leader-following consensus problem for a class of multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics and directed communication topology. The control input of the leader agent is assumed to be unknown to all follower agents. A distributed adaptive nonlinear control law is constructed using the relative state information between neighboring agents, which achieves leader-following consensus for any directed communication graph that contains a spanning tree with the root node being the leader agent. Compared with previous results, the nonlinear functions are not required to satisfy the globally Lipschitz or Lipschitz-like condition and the adaptive consensus protocol is in a distributed fashion. A numerical example is given to verify our proposed protocol.