Leader‐following consensus of fractional‐order multi‐agent systems via adaptive control

Abstract

Summary This article focuses on the consensus problem of leader‐following fractional‐order multi‐agent systems (MASs) with general linear and Lipschitz nonlinear dynamics. First, the distributed adaptive protocols for linear and nonlinear fractional‐order MASs are constructed, respectively. We allow the control coupling gains to be time varying for each agent. Moreover, the adaptive modification schemes for the control gain are designed, which renders smaller control gains and thus requires smaller amplitude on the control input without sacrificing consensus convergence. Second, based on fractional‐order Lyapunov stability theorem and Barbalat's lemma, two novel sufficient conditions in terms of linear matrix inequalities are provided to ensure that the leader‐following consensus can be obtained in the case for any undirected connected communication graph. Furthermore, we show that the proposed algorithm also works for consensus of agents with intrinsic Lipschitz nonlinear dynamics. As a result, the proposed framework requires no global information and thus can be implemented in a fully distributed manner. Finally, the numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of obtained the theoretical results.