On distributed consensus control of higher-order systems with dynamically changing directed interaction topologies

In this paper, we propose a distributed consensus control protocol which extends the first order system results of Ren and Beard (2005) to agents represented by a general higher order controllable linear system, under the same network connectivity assumption that the union of the directed interaction graphs contains a spanning tree frequently enough. We show that the consensus can be achieved asymptotically by the group of agents under our proposed distributed control protocol. Simulation study illustrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.