Novel distributed robust adaptive consensus protocols for linear multi-agent systems with directed graphs and external disturbances

This paper addresses the distributed consensus protocol design problem for linear multi-agent systems with directed graphs and external unmatched disturbances. A novel distributed adaptive consensus protocol is proposed to achieve leader-follower consensus for any directed graph containing a directed spanning tree with the leader as the root node. It is noted that the adaptive protocol might suffer from a problem of undesirable parameter drift phenomenon when bounded external disturbances exist. To deal with this issue, a distributed robust adaptive consensus protocol is designed to guarantee the ultimate boundedness of both the consensus error and the adaptive coupling weights in the presence of external disturbances. Both adaptive protocols are fully distributed, relying on only the agent dynamics and the relative states of neighboring agents.