An Output Feedback Cascade Control Approach to Distributed Consensus of Nonlinear Multiagent Systems With Output Delays

This paper explores the distributed output feedback leader-following full state cascade consensus problem for nonlinear multiagent systems subject to output delays based on a fixed directed topology. Output delays caused by information transmission are considered herein. In this situation, a new distributed consensus strategy is developed by utilizing the output feedback control approach. By introducing delay state equations for all agents, a novel cascade compensator with delays is built for each follower to compensate the full state tracking error among the follower and leader, which is only dependent on the correlative outputs of its neighbor agents. Then, we propose a static gain-based distributed output feedback controller for the follower by means of the compensator. By constructing the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, it is demonstrated that the designed controllers can guarantee that all agents will acquire leader-following consensus under the directed topology. Moreover, this result can be easily expanded to solve the consensus problem considering communication delays. Finally, the validity of our given theoretical result is determined by executing a numerical simulation.