A Consensus Control for a Multi-Agent System with Unknown Time-Varying Communication Delays

Abstract

A multi-agent system to have information flow among agents is bound to experience a communication delay over a directed graph. However, delay information is often unavailable and time varying. To deal with this problem, a consensus control for a second-order multi-agent system consisting of a leader and multiple followers is developed. Sliding mode control is exploited to deal with uncertainties incurred by unknown time varying communication delay and disturbance. The proposed sliding mode consensus control is shown to achieve the asymptotic bounded consensus and the finite time convergence of a sliding variable for any unknown time varying delay with the bounded first and the second derivative. The numerical simulations verify the properties of the proposed algorithm and its performance which is almost identical to one achieved by a consensus algorithm exploiting known delay information.