A Novel Leader-following Consensus of Multi-agent Systems with Smart Leader

This article studies the leader-following consensus problem for mixed-order multi-agent systems with a leader. Different from the traditional leader which is independent of all the other agents, the leader, called smart leader, can obtain and utilize the feedback information from its neighbors at some disconnected time intervals. A new distributed consensus control protocol based on intermittent control is developed for leader-following consensus with a smart leader. Moreover, the smart leader can adjust the control protocol based on the feedback information from its neighbors. With the aid of Lyapunov function, some sufficient conditions are derived for leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems with mixed-order dynamics under fixed directed topology. In addition, the similar results are obtained under switching directed topology. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the correctness and effectiveness of theoretical results.