Consensus tracking of multi-agent systems with reduced information: A fractional-order protocol approach

This paper studies the consensus tracking problem of a class of multi-agent systems where the dynamics of the leader and the followers are described respectively by integer and fractional order differential equations. It is shown that leader-following consensus tracking can be ensured if some carefully selected followers are informed and the relative position-based protocols are appropriately designed. A necessary and sufficient condition for the leader-following consensus in multi-agent systems is first proposed. It is found that, the real and imaginary parts of the eigenvalues of the augmented Laplacian matrix of the topology play important roles in achieving consensus. Finally, some numerical simulations are given to verify the effectiveness of the theoretical results.