Sampled-data leader-following consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems with communication delay

This paper is concerned with sampled-data leader-following consensus for nonlinear multi-agent systems with communication delay. Considering the effect of communication delay, a new sampled-data consensus control protocol with variable sampling period is proposed. With this protocol, the leader-following consensus of the multi-agent system is equivalently converted to the stability of a class of system with a time-varying delay. Then, by employing Lyapunov-Krosovskii functional method, a delay-dependent stability criterion is derived, which ensures that the leader-following consensus of the multiagent system can be asymptotically achieved. Moreover, based on this criterion, the consensus controller gain is obtained by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the design method.