Leader-following control for multiple inertial agents

This paper investigates distributed controller design problem for a leader-follower network in the presence of communication delays. Two main contributions are made in this work. First, the second-order controlled consensus scheme for the weakly connected communication graph topology is proposed. A necessary and sufficient condition is given under which the exponential consensus is achieved. Meanwhile, the relationship among the agents' inertias, the allowable delay bound, the communication topology, the consensus convergence rate, and the control gains is unveiled. Second, the robustness performances of the distributed control scheme with respect to the communication failures and delays are provided. It is shown that if the communication failure rate and the topology switching frequency, respectively, satisfy the given bounds, the exponential second-order controlled consensus can be achieved under a bounded delay. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the theoretical results. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.