Leader-following coordination of nonlinear agents under time-varying communication topologies

The paper deals with the consensus problem between nonlinear agents exchanging information through a time-varying communication network in a “leader-follower” configuration. Under a minimum-phase assumption on the follower dynamics, conditions under which the outputs of the followers track the output of the leader are presented in presence of not necessarily connected communication topologies. The theory of output regulation for nonlinear systems is adopted in order to design decentralised controllers embedding an internal model of the leader dynamics securing robust consensus between the agents.