Cooperative Consensus for Heterogeneous Nonlinear Multiagent Systems under a Leader Having Bounded Unknown Inputs

This article investigates the fully cooperative consensus problem for heterogeneous nonlinear multiagent systems with a leader of bounded unknown input. In the proposed framework, a novel distributed cooperative consensus algorithm is developed to derive the perfect consensus behaviors, in which the general assumption in existing works that the leader agent must have a direct link to every follower can be removed. With the formulation of some mild assumptions, the sufficient conditions for controller design are proposed to develop a class of integrated consensus protocol, which can friendly synthesize the limited interaction, compensation dynamics of the equilibrant point of the systems, appropriate feedback gains, and distributed estimation of the unknown inputs of the leader. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches are verified by simulations with multiple heterogeneous single-link manipulators.