Leader-follower consensus of upper-triangular nonlinear multi-agent systems

This paper is concerned with the leader-follower consensus problem by using both state and output feedback for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems. The agents considered here are all identical upper-triangular nonlinear systems which satisfy the Lipschitz growth condition. First, it is shown that the leader-follower consensus problem is equivalent to the control design problem of a high-dimensional multi-variable system. Second, by introducing an appropriate state transformation, the control design problem can be converted into the problem of finding a constant parameter, which can be obtained by solving the Lyapunov equation and estimating the nonlinear terms of the given system. At last, an example is given to verify effectiveness of the proposed consensus algorithms.