Leader-Follower Consensus with Unknown Control Direction

The paper considers leader-follower consensus of multi-agent networks with unknown control direction. Sliding mode control is used to achieve consensus tracking under fixed topology with the assumption that the position of the leader is known to a subset of the followers. The proposed consensus law assumes unknown sign in the control input matrix of the followers and does not require the knowledge of the leader's velocity. Lyapunov-based analysis is presented to show that if the directed graph of the network has a directed spanning tree then sliding mode control law can guarantee consensus tracking. Simulations results are provided to verify the feasibility of the proposed controller.