Distributed Consensus Control of Feedforward Nonlinear Time‐Delay Multi‐Agent Systems With Switching Topologies: A Time‐Varying Gain Approach

ABSTRACT In this paper, the distributed consensus control problem is investigated for feedforward nonlinear time‐delay multi‐agent systems under directed switching topologies. The notable characteristics of the considered system are subject to communication delay. Moreover, only part of the topologies have a directed spanning tree rooted at the leader. By constructing an observer and by means of the time‐varying gain approach, a delay‐dependent distributed output feedback controller is designed. It is proven that when the topology switching signal follows a general switching law, the developed control scheme guarantees that the leader‐follower consensus is achieved. Different from the existing results, the proposed control scheme can handle arbitrary bounded communication delay and increase the topology switching frequency. The feasibility of the proposed consensus protocol is demonstrated by a simulation example.