Time-varying leader-following consensus of high order multi-agent systems

In this paper, a time-varying leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems under fixed, connected and undirected communication topology is presented. In the proposed method, the dynamics of each agent including the followers and their corresponding leader is a linear nth order system. Moreover, the communication topology between the leader and its neighbours depends upon bounded and time-varying functions, assumed to remain connected as time passes. To tackle this problem, a set of time-varying distributed control laws for each follower agent is designed, based on algebraic graph theory, algebraic Riccati equation and Lyapunov direct method. Simulation results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method and display convergence to consensus is achieved in a finite time via time-varying distributed control laws.