Consensus of feedforward nonlinear systems with a time-varying communication delay

ABSTRACT

The consensus problem of feedforward nonlinear systems under an undirected network with a time-varying communication delay is studied. In order to solve this problem, new consensus controller with an additional design parameter that can eliminate the effect of a feedforward nonlinearity and a time-varying communication delay on the consensus problem is proposed. Also, it is proved that if an upper bound of time-varying delay is known, the proposed consensus controller can always solve the consensus problem of multi-agent systems even in the presence of feedforward nonlinearity and an arbitrarily large communication delay. A numerical example is given to illustrate the validness of the proposed approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Consensus
• feedforward nonlinear systems
• communication delay
• multi-agent system
• undirected network

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sungryul Lee

Sungryul Lee was born in Andong, Korea, in 1973. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 1996, 1998, and 2003, respectively. From 2003 to 2007, he was a research engineer with Samsung Electronics, Korea. Since 2007, he has been a professor in the Department of Control and Robotics Engineering, Kunsan National University, Korea. His research interests include nonlinear control theory and consensus of multi-agent systems.