Leaderless and leader-following consensus of linear multi-agent systems

This paper studies the consensus problems for multi-agent systems with general linear and nonlinear dynamics. The leaderless and leader-following consensus problems are investigated respectively. Contraction theory is employed to generate some sufficient conditions for testing the agents reaching consensus. Under these conditions and certain assumptions, the trajectories of multi-agent systems in directed topology will converge to each other. Finally, two numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed results.