Group consensus control for discrete‐time heterogeneous first‐ and second‐order multi‐agent systems

This study investigates the group consensus problem for heterogeneous multi‐agent systems composed of discrete‐time first‐ and second‐order agents. Two kinds of distributed group consensus protocols are proposed based on the information of the agent itself and its neighbours. Model transformation is introduced and some sufficient conditions are derived for heterogeneous multi‐agent systems with directed communication topology to reach group consensus by utilising the matrix theory and the graph theory. Finally, simulation examples are given to validate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.