A leader-follower consensus control of networked multi-agent systems under communication delays and switching topologies

The leader-follower consensus of networked multi-agent systems (NMASs) with time delays and switching topologies is studied in this paper. A consensus control strategy based on predictive control is proposed, which can actively compensate the communication delays in networks, and also achieve the state consensus and stability of leader agent and follower agents under switching topologies. By setting the integral term in the leader controller, the follower agents can track the states of the leader agent and achieve the desired goal. Finally, the effectiveness and engineering significance of the proposed control strategy are verified by numerical and experimental results of Air-Bearing Simulators (ABSs) platform.