Leader-Following Output Consensus for a Class of Lower-Triangular Multi-Agent Systems with Small Transmission Delays Based on Fully Actuated Approach

This paper investigates the leader-following output consensus problem for a class of multi-agent systems with transmission delays. First, a distributed observer is constructed to estimate the leader's output, with an upper bound established for admissible transmission delays. To address the unmeasurable states and inherent nonlinearities, we construct two classical observers and perform a fully-actuated transformation of the system dynamics. Building upon this foundation, an observer-based distributed controller is designed. Finally, the validity of the proposed method is verified by the Lyapunov stability theorem and a numerical simulation.