Leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems under directed communication topology via distributed adaptive nonlinear protocol

In this paper, we study the leader-following consensus problem of general linear multi-agent systems under directed communication topology. To avoid using any global information, an adaptive nonlinear protocol is proposed based only on the relative state information. It is proved that, for any directed communication graph that contains a spanning tree with the root node being the leader agent, the proposed control law solves the leader-following consensus problem. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.