Bounded Consensus Tracking of Heterogeneous Multiagent Systems Under Digraphs With Diverse Communication and Input Delays

We study the bounded consensus tracking problem for the heterogeneous multiagent system composed of single- and double-integrator agents in the presence of diverse communication and input delays. The objective is to ensure bounded tracking when only a portion of agents has access to the desired trajectory while agents interact with each other through a directed communication network. To achieve this goal, we propose a protocol consisting of a consensus-based trajectory estimator followed by a controller tracking the estimated trajectory for each agent. Though the agents involved in the mission are heterogeneous, the estimators of all the agents are designed as coupled single integrators to provide estimates of the acceleration, velocity, and position along the desired trajectory. The coupled single-integrator estimator followed by the tracking controller strategy leads to a decoupling whereby the allowable estimator gains for an agent depend only on its communication delays and its controller gains depend only on its input delay. The tracking errors remain bounded even if the desired acceleration is unknown to all the agents. Simulation results are carried out to validate the proposed consensus tracking algorithm.