Hybrid Control for Lag and Lag H∞ Consensus of Nonlinear Multi‐Agent Systems

ABSTRACT This paper considers the lag and lag consensus problem for second‐order nonlinear multi‐agent systems (MASs) under hybrid control, that is, the cases without and with communication delay. Hybrid control means that some agents are controlled by themselves, and the others are controlled by humans. The lag consensus of the multi‐agent system (MAS) is tackled on the basis of the appropriate control inputs for autonomous agents and humans, and the corresponding criterion is also established by utilizing inequality techniques. Furthermore, considering that time delay is unavoidable during communication among agents, a control scheme with communication delay is developed to guarantee the lag consensus of the MAS. Furthermore, these obtained results are further extended to the situation where exogenous interferences appear in the MAS. Finally, the performances of these presented control strategies are demonstrated via numerical examples.