Distributed Adaptive Leaderless Consensus Control of a Class of Strict Feedback Multiagent Systems with Communication Delays

This paper proposed a consensus protocol for a class of leaderless strict-feedback multiagent systems under the condition of communication delay. An example of a multiagent system made up of second-order integral agents is given, serving as a starting point to develop a distributed controller for each agent and investigate how to confirm the system’s stability. A local adjustment variable is created using signals gathered from neighboring agents, accounting for a time delay, to build a distributed controller for each subsystem. An adaptive rule linked to the compensatory variable is designed for each agent to reduce tracking errors with its neighbors, enabling all agents’ output states to align on a shared value. A stability analysis is provided, showing that under a strongly connected directed topology, all closed-loop signals stay uniformly bounded, and output agreement is reached over time. After that, a more general case is considered - a class of leaderless MASs where each agent’s dynamics are modeled as a strict-feedback high-order system.. Similar to the former case, An adaptive distributed consensus protocol and stability analysis are given. We use flexible manipulators for numerical simulation to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.