Adaptive super-twisting control for leader-following consensus of second-order multi-agent systems based on time-varying gains.

In this paper, robust distributed consensus control is designed based on adaptive time-varying gains for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems (MAS) in the presence of uncertain parameters and external disturbances with unknown upper bounds. Due to various conditions and constraints, different dynamical models for the agents can be considered in practice. On the basis of a continuous homogeneous consensus method which has been proposed for the nominal nonlinear MAS, the discontinuous and continuous adaptive integral sliding mode control strategies are particularly designed and extended to accomplish exact and precise consensus for non-identical MASs influenced by imposed perturbations. However, it is noted that in practical problems, the exact upper bound of perturbations is unknown. Then, the proposed controllers have been improved in an adaptive scheme to overcome this drawback. In addition to the adaptive estimation strategy and time-varying gains, which address considered uncertain parameters in the dynamics of the following agents, the designed distributed super-twisting sliding mode strategy for nonlinear agents adjusts the gain of the control inputs and guarantees that the proposed protocol performs properly without any setbacks of the chattering phenomenon. The illustrative simulations depict the robustness, accuracy, and effectiveness of the designed methods.