Distributed coordination for second-order multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics using only relative position measurements

In this paper, we study the distributed coordination for second-order multi-agent systems with intrinsic nonlinear dynamics under an undirected graph that characterizes the interaction among the agents or followers. Both the leaderless consensus problem and the coordinated tracking problem with a dynamic leader are considered. By introducing a distributed filter for each agent or follower, the proposed control algorithms use only relative position measurements in the absence of communication. In the special case without the intrinsic nonlinear dynamics, i.e., for multi-agent systems with double-integrator dynamics, we further derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the leaderless consensus problem under a general directed graph. Finally, simulation examples are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithms.