Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Consensus Tracking of Multi-Agent Time-Delay Systems

In this paper, a distributed protocol is proposed to solve the consensus tracking problem under heterogeneous input and communication delays. In contrast to consensus which can be achieved even without knowledge of the communication delay, tracking a general trajectory requires precise information about the individual delays. The proposed protocol is customized as a tracking controller in conjunction with a consensus-based estimator for the desired trajectory. The tracking controllers accommodate the input delays whereas communication delays govern the stability of the estimators. The tracking problem of single integrator agents is first addressed and later adapted for double-integrator agents. The choice of coupled single-integrator estimators for the double-integrator agents eases gain tuning. Simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.