Distributed input observer‐based consensus for the leader‐following multi‐agent systems

Abstract This paper focuses on the consensus problem for leader‐following second‐order multi‐agent systems. It is evident that knowledge of the leader's input will critically help a follower to track the leader. But under certain environments, only a fraction of followers could obtain the leader's input information. In order to reach consensus expeditiously and effectively, a novel input observers based protocol is built for each follower. Under this protocol, sufficient conditions for the consensus are proposed analytically. Finally, the validity of the theoretical analysis is illustrated by simulation examples.