A novel consensus algorithm for second-order multi-agent systems without velocity measurements

In this paper, a novel consensus protocol for second-order multi-agent systems is elegantly designed, and it relaxes the common requirement of the velocity information of the agents. An interesting consensus criterion is explicitly derived in terms of the proposed cooperation law provided that the dynamical equation for each agent is linear. As an extension, the proposed cooperation rule is further extended to a general scenario, where the coupling weights characterizing the relationships among the neighboring agents are time-varying. Accordingly, two distributed cooperative algorithms (node/edge-based scheme) are explicitly designed. Moreover, we study the case of network with switching communication setting. It shows that edge-based law is capable with the time-varying topology, while the node-based scheme is not. In addition, the proposed coordination strategies are applied to the tracking problem as well. Finally, these obtained consensus results are well supported in the light of the pendulum models. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.