Leader-following Formation Control of Second-order Nonlinear Systems with Time-varying Communication Delay

In this paper, time-varying formation tracking problem for second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems with time-varying communication delays has been investigated, where the followers maintain a predefined time-varying formation while tracking the moving leader. Based on a distributed observer, a formation tracking protocol with time-varying delay is developed using the relative neighboring information. By constructing the Lyapunov-Krasovskii (L-K) function, sufficient conditions have been obtained to guarantee the stability of time-varying formation tracking. In addition, the unknown gain matrix in the proposed protocol is computed out through the technique of variable substitution. Numerical simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of our theoretical analysis.