Brief paper: Leader-following consensus for multi-agent systems via sampled-data control

In this article, the authors study a leader-following consensus problem for multi-agent systems in a sampled-data setting. A distributed coordination algorithm based on sampled-data control is proposed to track the considered leader. By employing M-matrix theory, the authors derive sufficient conditions on the sampling period and control parameters to ensure that the tracking errors are bounded. Numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results. Moreover, some previous results concerning the leader-following problem with switched coupling topology are improved.