High-order consensus of heterogeneous multi-agent systems

This paper studies the high-order consensus problem for heterogeneous multi-agent systems with unknown communication delays. It is shown that high-order consensus may exist in systems with heterogeneous agents. A necessary and sufficient condition is given for the existence of high-order consensus solution to heterogeneous multi-agent systems. The obtained condition shows that for systems with diverse communication delays, high-order consensus does not require each self-delay of agent is equal to the corresponding communication delay. A matching condition for self-delays and communication delays is derived. Finally, when communication delays are unknown, an adaptive adjustment mechanism is proposed for on-line adjusting self-delays.