Distributed leader-following consensus of feedforward nonlinear delayed multiagent systems via general switched compensation control

This work examines the distributed leader-following consensus problem of feedforward nonlinear delayed multiagent systems involving directed switching topologies. In contrast to the existing studies, we focus on time delays acting on the outputs of feedforward nonlinear systems, and we permit that the partial topology dissatisfy the directed spanning tree condition. In the cases, we present a novel output feedback-based general switched cascade compensation control method that addresses the above-mentioned problem. First, we put forward a distributed switched cascade compensator by introducing multiple equations, and we design the delay-dependent distributed output feedback controller with the compensator. Subsequently, when the control parameters-dependent linear matrix inequality is met and the switching signal of the topologies obeys a general switching law, we prove that the established controller can render that the follower’s state asymptotically tracks the leader’s state by employing an appropriate Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional. The given algorithm allows output delays to be arbitrarily large and increases the switching frequency of the topologies. A numerical simulation is presented to demonstrate the practicability of our proposed strategy.